^     • 


.^ 


ASPECTS    AND    IMPRESSIONS 


C.  K.  OGDEN" 


Aspects  and 
Impressions 


By 

Edmund  Gosse,  c.B. 

D.Litt.  of  Cambridge  University ; 
LL.D.  of  St.  Andrews 


New   York 

Charles    Scribner's    Sons 

1922 


PH 


SANTA  BAiiBAKA 


My  Friend 
JOHN  G.  SQUIRE 

Poet,  Editor,  and  Critic 


These  Essays  are  mainly  reprinted  from  The  Edinhirgh 
Review,  The  London  Mercury,  The  Modern  Languages  Review, 
and  The  Fortnightly  Revieiv.  "  Malherbe  and  the  Classical 
Reaction  "  was  the  Taylorian  Lecture  at  Oxford  for  1920, 
and  is  included  here  by  the  courtesy  of  the  authorities 
of  the  University. 


Contents 


PAGE 

George  Eliot i 

Henry  James 17 

Samuel  Butler 55 

A  Note  on  Congreve 77 

The  First  Draft  of  Swinburne's  "  Anactoria  "  87 

The  Hotel  de  Rambouillet  ....  97 

Malherbe  and  the  Classical  Reaction          .  123 

The  Foundation  of  the  French  Academy     .  145 

Rousseau    in    England    in    the    Nineteenth 

Century  .......  169 

The  Centenary  of  Leconte  de  Lisle    .         .193 

Two  French  Critics  :    Emile  Faguet — Remy 

DE  Gourmont  ......  203 

The  Writings  of  M.  Clemenceau  .         .         .  225 

A  Visit  to  the  Friends  of  Ibsen  .         .         .  247 

Fairyland  and  a  Belgian  Ariosto         .         .  261 

Some  Recollections  of  Lord  Wolseley        .  273 

Index 291 


Aspects  and  Impressions 


GEORGE    ELIOT 

IN  and  after  1876,  when  I  was  in  the  habit  of  walking 
from  the  north-west  of  London  towards  Whitehall,  I 
met  several  times,  driven  slowly  homewards,  a  victoria 
which  contained  a  strange  pair  in  whose  appearance  I  took 
a  violent  interest.  The  man,  prematurely  ageing,  was 
hirsute,  rugged,  satyr-like,  gazing  vivaciously  to  left  and 
right;  this  was  George  Henry  Lewes.  His  companion 
was  a  large,  thickset  sybil,  dreamy  and  immobile,  whose 
massive  features,  somewhat  grim  when  seen  in  profile, 
were  incongruously  bordered  by  a  hat,  always  in  the  height 
of  the  Paris  fashion,  which  in  those  days  commonly  in- 
cluded an  immense  ostrich  feather;  this  was  George  Eliot. 
The  contrast  between  the  solemnity  of  the  face  and  the 
frivolity  of  the  headgear  had  something  pathetic  and 
provincial  about  it. 

All  this  I  mention,  for  what  trifling  value  it  may  have, 
as  a  purely  external  impression,  since  I  never  had  the 
honour  of  speaking  to  the  lady  or  to  Lewes.  We  had,  my 
wife  and  I,  common  friends  in  the  gifted  family  of  Simcox 
• — Edith  Simcox  (who  wrote  ingeniously  and  learnedly 
under  the  pen-name  of  H.  Lawrenny)  being  an  intimate 
in  the  household  at  the  Priory.  Thither,  indeed,  I  was 
vaguely  invited,  by  word  of  mouth,  to  make  my  appear- 
ance one  Sunday,  George  Eliot  having  read  some  pages 
of  mine  with  indulgence.  But  I  was  shy,  and  yet  should 
probably  have  obeyed  the  summons  but  for  an  event  which 
nobody  foresaw.  On  the  i8th  of  December,  1880,  I  was 
present  at  a  concert  given,  I  think,  in  the  Langham  Hall, 
where   I  sat  just   behind   Mrs.   Cross,   as  she   had   then 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

bc'conic.  It  was  chilly  in  tlie  concert-room,  and  I  watched 
Georpi'e  EHot,  in  manifest  discomfort,  drawing  up  and 
(imhlcnin^  round  lior  shoulders  a  white  wool  shawl.  Four 
days  later  she  was  dead,  and  I  was  sorry  that  I  had  never 
made  my  bow  to  her. 

Her  death  caused  a  ^reat  sensation,  for  she  had  ruled 
the  wide  and  flourishing  province  of  English  prose  fiction 
for  ten  years,  since  the  death  of  Dickens.  Though  she 
had  a  vast  company  of  competitors,  she  did  not  suffer 
through  that  period  from  the  rivalry  of  one  writer  of  her 
own  class.  If  the  Brontes  had  lived,  or  Mrs.  Gaskell, 
the  case  might  have  been  different,  for  George  Eliot  had 
neither  the  passion  of  Jane  Eyre  nor  the  perfection  of 
Cranford,  but  they  were  gone  before  we  lost  Dickens, 
and  so  was  Thackeray,  who  died  while  Romola  was  ap- 
pearing. Charles  Kingsley,  whose  Westward  Ho!  had 
just  preceded  her  first  appearance,  had  unluckily  turned 
into  other  and  less  congenial  paths.  Charles  Reade, 
whose  It  is  Never  Too  Late  to  Mend  (1856)  had  been  her 
harbinger,  scarcely  maintained  his  position  as  her  rival. 
Anthony  Trollope,  excellent  craftsman  as  he  was,  remained 
persistently  and  sensibly  at  a  lower  intellectual  level. 
Hence  the  field  was  free  for  George  Eliot,  who,  without 
haste  or  hesitation,  built  up  slowly  such  a  reputation  as 
no  one  in  her  own  time  could  approach. 

The  gay  world,  which  forgets  everything,  has  forgotten 
what  a  solemn,  what  a  portentous  thing  was  the  con- 
temporary fame  of  George  Eliot.  It  was  supported  by 
the  serious  thinkers  of  the  day,  by  the  people  who  despised 
mere  novels,  but  regarded  her  w-ritings  as  contributions  to 
philosophical  literature.  On  the  solitary  occasion  when 
I  sat  in  company  with  Herbert  Spencer  on  the  committee 
of  the  London  Library  he  expressed  a  strong  objection 
to  the  purchase  of  fiction,  and  wished  that  for  the  London 
Library  no  novels  should  be  bought,  "except,  of  course, 
those  of  George  Eliot."  While  she  lived,  critics  com- 
pared her  with  Goethe,  but  to  the  disadvantage  of  the 
sage  of  Weimar.  People  who  started  controversies  about 
evolutionism,  a  favourite  Victorian  pastime,  bowed  low  at 

2 


George   Eliot 

the  mention  of  her  name,  and  her  own  strong  good  sense 
alone  prevented  her  from  being  made  the  object  of  a  sort 
of  priggish  idolatry.  A  big-wig  of  that  day  remarked 
that  "in  problems  of  life  and  thought  which  baffled  Shake- 
speare her  touch  was  unfailing."  For  Lord  Acton  at  her 
death  "the  sun  had  gone  out,"  and  that  exceedingly 
dogmatic  historian  observed,  ex  cathedra,  that  no  writer 
had  "ever  lived  who  had  anything  like  her  power  of 
manifold  but  disinterested  and  impartial  sympathy.  If 
Sophocles  or  Cervantes  had  lived  in  the  light  of  our 
culture,  if  Dante  had  prospered  like  Manzoni,  George 
Eliot  might  have  had  a  rival."  It  is  very  dangerous  to 
write  like  that.  A  reaction  is  sure  to  follow,  and  in  the 
case  of  this  novelist,  so  modest  and  strenuous  herself,  but 
so  ridiculously  overpraised  by  her  friends,  it  came  with 
remarkable  celerity. 

The  worship  of  an  intellectual  circle  of  admirers,  rever- 
berating upon  a  dazzled  and  genuinely  interested  public, 
was  not,  however,  even  in  its  palmiest  days,  quite  unani- 
mous. There  were  other  strains  of  thought  and  feeling 
making  way,  and  other  prophets  were  abroad.  Robert 
Browning,  though  an  optimist,  and  too  polite  a  man  to 
oppose  George  Eliot  publicly,  was  impatient  of  her  oracular 
manner.  There  was  a  struggle,  not  much  perceived  on 
the  surface  of  the  reviews,  between  her  faithful  worshippers 
and  the  new  school  of  writers  vaguely  called  pre-Raphaelite. 
She  loved  Matthew  Arnold's  poetry,  and  in  that,  as  in  so 
much  else,  she  was  wiser  and  more  clairvoyant  than  most 
of  the  people  who  surrounded  her,  but  Arnold  preserved 
an  attitude  of  reserve  with  regard  to  her  later  novels.  She 
found  nothing  to  praise  or  to  attract  her  interest  in  the 
books  of  George  Meredith ;  on  the  other  hand,  Coventry 
Patmore,  with  his  customary  amusing  violence,  voted  her 
novels  "sensational  and  improper."  To  D.  G.  Rossetti 
they  were  "vulgarity  personified,"  and  his  brother  defined 
them  as  "commonplace  tempering  the  stuck-up."  Swin- 
burne repudiated  Romola  with  vigour  as  "absolutely 
false."  I  dare  say  that  from  several  of  these  her  great 
contemporaries  less  harsh  estimates  of  her  work  might  be 

3 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

culled,  but  I  (|U()t(;  these  to  sliow  that  even  at  the  height  of 
her  fame  she  was  not  quite  unchallenged. 

She  was  herself,  it  is  impossible  to  deny,  responsible 
for  a  good  deal  of  the  tarnish  which  spread  over  the  gold 
of  her  reputation.  Her  early  imaginative  writings — in 
particular  Janet's  Repentance,  Adam  Bede,  the  first  two- 
thirds  of  The  Mill  on  the  Floss,  and  much  of  Silas  Marner 
— had  a  freshness,  a  bright  vitality,  which,  if  she  could 
have  kept  it  burnished,  would  have  preserved  her  from  all 
effects  of  contemporary  want  of  sympathy.  When  we 
analyse  the  charm  of  the  stories  just  mentioned,  we  find 
that  it  consists  very  largely  in  tiieir  felicity  of  expressed 
reminiscence.  There  is  little  evidence  in  them  of  the  in- 
ventive faculty,  but  a  great  deal  of  the  reproductive. 
Now,  we  have  to  remember  that  contemporaries  are  quite 
in  the  dark  as  to  matters  about  which,  after  the  publication 
of  memoirs  and  correspondence  and  recollections,  later 
readers  are  exactly  informed.  We  may  now  know  that  Sir 
Christopher  Cheverel  closely  reproduces  the  features  of  a 
real  Sir  Roger  Newdigate,  and  that  Dinah  Morris  is  Mrs. 
Samuel  Evans  photographed,  but  readers  of  i860  did  not 
know  that,  and  were  at  liberty  to  conceive  the  unknown 
magician  in  the  act  of  calling  up  a  noble  English  gentle- 
man and  a  saintly  Methodist  preacher  from  the  depths  of 
her  inner  consciousness.  Whether  this  was  so  or  not 
would  not  matter  to  anyone,  if  George  Eliot  could  have 
continued  the  act  of  pictorial  reproduction  without  flag- 
ging. The  world  would  have  long  gazed  with  pleasure 
into  the  camera  obscura  of  Warwickshire,  as  she  reeled  off 
one  dark  picture  after  another,  but  unhappily  she  was  not 
contented  with  her  success,  and  she  aimed  at  things  beyond 
her  reach. 

Her  failure,  which  was,  after  all  (let  us  not  exaggerate), 
the  partial  and  accidental  failure  of  a  great  genius,  began 
when  she  turned  from  passive  acts  of  memory  to  a 
strenuous  exercise  of  intellect.  If  I  had  time  and  space, 
it  would  be  very  interesting  to  study  George  Eliot's 
attitude  towards  that  mighty  woman,  the  full-bosomed 
caryatid  of  romantic  literature,  who  had  by  a  few  years 

4 


George  Eliot 

preceded  her.  When  George  Eliot  was  at  the  outset  of 
her  own  Hterary  career,  which  as  we  know  was  much 
belated,  George  Sand  had  already  bewitched  and  thrilled 
and  scandalized  Europe  for  a  generation.  The  impact  of 
the  Frenchwoman's  mind  on  that  of  her  English  contem- 
porary produced  sparks  or  flashes  of  starry  enthusiasm. 
George  Eliot,  in  1848,  was  "bowing  before  George  Sand 
in  eternal  gratitude  to  that  great  power  of  God  manifested 
in  her,"  and  her  praise  of  the  French  peasant-idyls  was 
unbounded.  But  when  she  herself  began  to  write  novels 
she  grew  to  be  less  and  less  in  sympathy  with  the  French 
romantic  school.  A  French  critic  of  her  own  day  laid 
down  the  axiom  that  "il  faut  bien  que  le  roman  se 
rapproche  de  la  po6sie  ou  de  la  science."  George  Sand 
had  thrown  herself  unreservedly  into  the  poetic  camp. 
She  acknowledged  "mon  instinct  m'eut  poussee  vers  les 
abimes,"  and  she  confessed,  with  that  stalwart  good  sense 
which  carried  her  genius  over  so  many  marshy  places, 
that  her  temperament  had  often  driven  her,  "au  mepris  de 
la  raison  ou  de  la  verity  morale,"  into  pure  romantic 
extravagance. 

But  George  Eliot,  whatever  may  have  been  her  pre- 
liminary enthusiasms,  was  radically  and  permanently 
anti-romantic.  This  was  the  source  of  her  strength  and 
of  her  weakness;  this,  carefully  examined,  explains  the 
soaring  and  the  sinking  of  her  fame.  Unlike  George 
Sand,  she  kept  to  the  facts;  she  found  that  all  her  power 
quitted  her  at  once  if  she  dealt  with  imaginary  events  and 
the  clash  of  ideal  passions.  She  had  been  drawn  in  her 
youth  to  sincere  admiration  of  the  Indianas  and  Lelias  of 
her  florid  French  contemporary,  and  we  become  aware  that 
in  the  humdrum  years  at  Coventry,  when  the  surround- 
ings of  her  own  life  were  arduous  and  dusty,  she  felt 
a  longing  to  spread  her  wings  and  fly  up  and  out  to  some 
dim  Cloud-Cuckoo  Land  the  confines  of  which  were  utterly 
vague  to  her.  The  romantic  method  of  Dumas,  for  in- 
stance, and  even  of  Walter  Scott,  appealed  to  her  as  a 
mode  of  escaping  to  dreamland  from  the  flatness  and  vul- 
garity of  life  under  the  "miserable  reign  of  Mammon." 
B  5 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

But  she  could  not  achieve  such  flights;  her  literary  char- 
acter was  of  a  totally  different  formation.  What  was 
fabulous,  what  was  artificial,  did  not  so  much  strike  her 
with  disgust  as  render  her  paralysed.  Her  only  escape 
from  mediocrity,  she  found,  was  to  give  a  philosophical 
interest  to  common  themes.  In  consequence,  as  she  ad- 
vanced in  life,  and  came  more  under  the  influence  of 
George  Henry  Lewes,  she  became  less  and  less  well  dis- 
posed towards  the  French  fiction  of  her  day,  rejecting  even 
Balzac,  to  whom  she  seems,  strangely  enough,  to  have 
preferred  Lessing.  That  Lessing  and  Balzac  should  be 
names  pronounced  in  relation  itself  throws  a  light  on  the 
temper  of  the  speaker. 

Most  novelists  seem  to  have  begun  to  tell  stories  almost 
as  early  as  musicians  begin  to  trifle  with  the  piano.  The 
child  keeps  other  children  awake,  after  nurse  has  gone 
about  her  business,  by  reeling  off  inventions  in  the  dark. 
But  George  Eliot  showed,  so  far  as  records  inform  us, 
no  such  aptitude  in  infancy  or  even  in  early  youth.  The 
history  of  her  start  as  a  novel-writer  is  worthy  of  study. 
It  appears  that  it  was  not  until  the  autumn  of  1856  that 
she,  "in  a  dreamy  mood,"  fancied  herself  writing  a  story. " 
This  was,  I  gather,  immediately  on  her  return  from  Ger- 
many, where  she  had  been  touring  about  with  Lewes,  with 
whom  she  had  now  been  living  for  two  years.  Lewes  said 
to  her,  "You  have  wit,  description,  and  philosophy — those 
go  a  good  way  towards  the  production  of  a  novel,"  and 
he  encouraged  her  to  write  about  the  virtues  and  vices  of 
the  clergy,  as  she  had  observed  them  at  Griff  and  at 
Coventry.  Amos  Barton  was  the  immediate  result,  and 
the  stately  line  of  stories  which  was  to  close  in  Daniel 
Deronda  twenty  years  later  was  started  on  its  brilliant 
career.  But  what  of  the  author  ?  She  was  a  storm-tried 
matron  of  thirty-seven,  who  had  sub-edited  the  West- 
minster Revieiv,  who  had  spent  years  in  translating 
Strauss's  Life  of  Jesus  and  had  sunk  exhausted  in  a  still 
more  strenuous  wrestling  with  the  Tractatus  Theologico- 
PoUticus  of  Spinozri,  wiio  had  worked  with  Delarive  at 
Experimental  Physics  in  Geneva,  and  who  had  censured, 

6 


George  Eliot 

as  superficial,  John  Stuart  Mill's  treatment  of  Whewell's 
Moral  Philosophy.  This  heavily-built  Miss  Marian 
Evans,  now  dubiously  known  as  Mrs.  Lewes,  whose 
features  at  that  time  are  familiar  to  us  by  the  admirable 
paintings  and  drawings  of  Sir  Frederick  Burton,  was  in 
training  to  be  a  social  reformer,  a  moral  philosopher,  an 
apostle  of  the  creed  of  Christendom,  an  anti-theological 
professor,  anything  in  the  world  rather  than  a  writer  of 
idle  tales. 

But  the  tales  proved  to  be  a  hundredfold  more  attrac- 
tive to  the  general  public  than  articles  upon  taxation  or 
translations  from  German  sceptics.  We  all  must  allow 
that  at  last,  however  tardily  and  surprisingly,  George  Eliot 
had  discovered  her  true  vocation.  Let  us  consider  in  what 
capacity  she  entered  this  field  of  fiction.  She  entered  it 
as  an  observer  of  life  more  diligent  and  more  meticulous 
perhaps  than  any  other  living  person.  She  entered  it  also 
with  a  store  of  emotional  experience  and  with  a  richness 
of  moral  sensibility  which  were  almost  as  unique.  She 
had  strong  ethical  prejudices,  and  a  wealth  of  recollected 
examples  by  which  she  could  justify  them.  Her  memory 
was  accurate,  minute,  and  well  arranged,  and  she  had 
always  enjoyed  retrospection  and  encouraged  herself  in 
the  cultivation  of  it.  She  was  very  sympathetic,  very 
tolerant,  and  although  she  had  lived  in  the  very  Temple 
of  Priggishness  with  her  Brays  and  her  Hennells  and  her 
Sibrees,  she  remained  singularly  simple  and  unaffected. 
Rather  sad,  one  pictures  her  in  1856,  rather  dreamy, 
burdened  with  an  excess  of  purely  intellectual  preoccupa- 
tion, wandering  over  Europe  consumed  by  a  constant,  but 
unconfessed,  nostalgia  for  her  own  country,  coming  back 
to  it  with  a  sense  that  the  Avon  was  lovelier  than  the 
Arno.  Suddenly,  in  that  "dreamy  mood,"  there  comes 
over  her  a  desire  to  build  up  again  the  homes  of  her  child- 
hood, to  forget  all  about  Rousseau  and  experimental 
physics,  and  to  reconstruct  the  "dear  old  quaintnesses  " 
of  the  Arbury  of  twenty-five  years  before. 

If  we  wish  to  see  what  it  was  which  this  mature 
philosopher  and  earnest  critic  of  behaviour  had  to  pro- 

7 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

duce  for  the  surprise  of  her  readers,  we  may  examine  the 
description  of  the  farm  at  Donnilhorne  in  Adam  Bede. 
The  solemn  lady,  who  might  seem  such  a  terror  to  ill- 
doers,  had  yet  a  packet  of  the  most  delicious  fondants  in 
the  pocket  of  her  bombazine  gown.  The  names  of  these 
sweetmeats,  which  were  of  a  flavour  and  a  texture  delicious 
to  the  tongue,  might  be  Mrs.  Poyser  or  Lizzie  Jerome  or 
the  sisters  Dodson,  but  they  all  came  from  the  Warwick- 
shire factory  at  Griff,  and  they  were  all  manufactured  with 
the  sugar  and  spice  of  memory.  So  long  as  George  Eliot 
lived  in  the  past,  and  extracted  her  honey  from  those 
wonderful  cottage  gardens  which  fill  her  early  pages  with 
their  colour  and  their  odour,  the  solidity  and  weight  of 
her  intellectual  methods  in  other  fields  did  not  interfere, 
or  interfered  in  a  negligible  way,  with  the  power  and 
intensity  of  the  entertainment  she  offered.  We  could  wish 
for  nothing  better.  English  literature  has,  of  their  own 
class,  nothing  better  to  offer  than  certain  chapters  of  Adam 
Bede  or  than  the  beginning  oi  The  Mill  on  the  Floss. 

But,  from  the  first,  if  we  now  examine  coldly  and  in- 
quisitively, there  was  a  moth  sleeping  in  George  Eliot's 
rich  attire.  This  moth  was  pedantry,  the  result,  doubtless, 
of  too  much  erudition  encouraging  a  natural  tendency  in 
her  mind,  which  as  we  have  seen  was  acquisitive  rather 
than  inventive.  It  was  unfortunate  for  her  genius  that 
after  her  early  enthusiasm  for  French  culture  she  turned 
to  Germany  and  became,  in  measure,  like  so  many  power- 
ful minds  of  her  generation,  Teutonized.  This  fostered 
the  very  tendencies  which  it  was  desirable  to  eradicate. 
One  can  but  speculate  what  would  have  been  the  result  on 
her  genius  of  a  little  more  Paris  and  a  little  less  Berlin. 
Her  most  successful  immediate  rival  in  France  was  Octave 
Feuillet;  the  Scenes  of  Clerical  Life  answer  in  time  to 
Le  Roman  d'un  Jeune  Homme  Pauvre,  and  Monsieur  de 
Camors  to  Felix  Holt.  There  could  not  be  a  stronger  or 
more  instructive  contrast  than  between  the  elegant  fairy- 
land of  the  one  and  the  robust  realism  of  the  other.  But 
our  admirable  pastoral  writer,  whose  inward  eye  was 
stored  with  the  harmonies  and  humours  of  Shakespeare's 

8 


George   Eliot 

country,  was  not  content  with  her  mastery  of  the  past. 
She  looked  forward  to  a  Hterature  of  the  future.  She 
trusted  to  her  brain  rather  than  to  those  tired  servants, 
her  senses,  and  more  and  more  her  soul  was  invaded  by 
the  ambition  to  invent  a  new  thing,  the  scientific  novel, 
dealing  with  the  growth  of  institutions  and  the  analysis 
of  individual  character. 

The  critics  of  her  own  time  were  satisfied  that  she  had 
done  this,  and  that  she  had  founded  the  psychological 
novel.  There  was  much  to  be  said  in  favour  of  such  an 
opinion.  In  the  later  books  it  is  an  undeniable  fact  that 
George  Eliot  displays  a  certain  sense  of  the  inevitable 
progress  of  life  which  was  new.  It  may  seem  paradoxical 
to  see  the  peculiar  characteristics  of  Zola  or  of  Mr.  George 
Moore  in  Middlemarch,  but  there  is  much  to  be  said  for 
the  view  that  George  Eliot  was  the  direct  forerunner  of 
those  naturalistic  novelists.  Like  them,  she  sees  life  as 
an  organism,  or  even  as  a  progress.  George  Eliot  in 
her  contemplation  of  the  human  beings  she  invents  is  a 
traveller,  who  is  provided  with  a  map.  No  Norman  church 
or  ivied  ruin  takes  her  by  surprise,  because  she  has  seen 
that  it  was  bound  to  come,  and  recognizes  it  when  it  does 
come.  Death,  the  final  railway  station,  is  ever  in  her 
mind;  she  sees  it  on  her  map,  and  gathers  her  property 
around  her  to  be  ready  when  the  train  shall  stop.  This 
psychological  clairvoyance  gives  her  a  great  power  when 
she  does  not  abuse  it,  but  unfortunately  from  the  very  first 
there  was  in  her  a  tendency,  partly  consequent  on  her 
mental  training,  but  also  not  a  little  on  her  natural  con- 
stitution, to  dwell  in  a  hard  and  pedagogic  manner  on  it. 
She  was  not  content  to  please,  she  must  explain  and  teach 
as  well. 

Her  comparative  failure  to  please  made  its  definite  ap- 
pearance first  in  the  laboured  and  overcharged  romance  of 
Romola.  But  a  careful  reader  will  detect  it  in  her  earliest 
writings.  Quite  early  in  Amos  Barton,  for  instance,  when 
Mrs.  Hackit  observes  of  the  local  colliers  that  they  "passed 
their  time  in  doing  nothing  but  swilling  ale  and  smoking, 
like  the  beasts  that  perish,"  the  author  immediately  spoils 

9 


Aspects  and   Impressions 

this  delightful  remark  by  explaininfi^,  like  a  schoolmaster, 
that  Mrs.  Ilackit  was  "speaking,  we  may  presume,  in  a 
remotely  analogical  sense."  The  laughter  dies  upon  our 
lips.  Useless  pedantry  of  this  kind  spoils  many  a  happy 
touch  of  humour,  Mrs.  Poyser  alone  perhaps  having 
wholly  escaped  from  it.  It  would  be  entirely  unjust  to 
accuse  George  Eliot,  at  all  events  until  near  the  end  of 
her  life,  of  intellectual  pride.  She  was,  on  the  contrary, 
of  a  very  humble  spirit,  timorous  and  susceptible  of  dis- 
couragement. But  her  humility  made  her  work  all  the 
harder  at  her  task  of  subtle  philosophical  analysis.  It 
would  have  been  far  better  for  her  if  she  had  possessed 
less  of  the  tenacity  of  Herbert  Spencer  and  mofe  of  the 
recklessness  of  George  Sand.  An  amusing  but  painful 
example  of  her  Sisyphus  temper,  always  rolling  the  stone 
uphill  with  groans  and  sweat,  is  to  be  found  in  her  own 
account  of  the  way  she  "crammed  up  "  for  the  composition 
of  Romola.  She  tells  us  of  the  wasting  toil  with  which 
she  worked  up  innumerable  facts  about  Florence,  and  in 
particular  how  she  laboured  long  over  the  terrible  question 
whether  Easter  could  have  been  "retarded  "  in  the  year 
1492.  On  this,  Sir  Leslie  Stephen — one  of  her  best  critics, 
and  one  of  the  most  indulgent — aptly  queries,  "What 
would  have  become  of  Ivanhoe  if  Scott  had  bothered  him- 
self about  the  possible  retardation  of  Easter  ?  The  answer, 
indeed,  is  obvious,  that  Ivanhoe  would  not  have  been 
written." 

The  effect  of  all  this  on  George  Eliot's  achievement  was 
what  must  always  occur  when  an  intellect  which  is  purely 
acquisitive  and  distributive  insists  on  doing  work  that  is 
appropriate  only  to  imagination.  If  we  read  very  carefully 
the  scene  preceding  Savonarola's  sermon  to  the  Domini- 
cans at  San  Marco,  we  perceive  that  it  is  built  up  almost 
in  Flaubert's  manner,  but  without  Flaubert's  magic,  touch 
by  touch,  out  of  books.  The  author  does  not  see  what 
she  describes  in  a  sort  of  luminous  hallucination,  but  she 
dresses  up  in  language  of  her  own  what  she  has  carefully 
read  in  Burlamacchi  or  in  Villari.  The  most  conscientious 
labour,  expended  by  the  most  powerful  brain,  is  incapable 

10 


George   Eliot 

of  producing  an  illusion  of  life  by  these  means.  George 
Eliot  may  even  possibly  have  been  conscious  of  this,  for 
she  speaks  again  and  again,  not  of  writing  with  ecstasy 
of  tears  and  laughter,  as  Dickens  did,  but  of  falling  into 
"a  state  of  so  much  wretchedness  in  attempting  to  concen- 
trate my  thoughts  on  the  construction  of  my  novel  "  that 
nothing  but  a  tremendous  and  sustained  effort  of  the  will 
carried  her  on  at  all.  In  this  vain  and  terrible  wrestling 
with  incongruous  elements  she  wore  out  her  strength  and 
her  joy,  and  it  is  heart-rending  to  watch  so  noble  a  genius 
and  so  lofty  a  character  as  hers  wasted  in  the  whirlpool. 
One  fears  that  a  sense  of  obscure  failure  added  to  her  tor- 
tures, and  one  is  tempted  to  see  a  touch  of  autobiography 
in  the  melancholy  of  Mrs.  Transome  (in  Felix  Holt),  of 
whom  we  are  told  that  "her  knowledge  and  accomplish- 
ments had  become  as  valueless  as  old-fashioned  stucco 
ornaments,  of  which  the  substance  was  never  worth  any- 
thing, while  the  form  is  no  longer  to  the  taste  of  any 
living  mortal." 

The  notion  that  George  Eliot  was  herself,  in  spite  of 
all  the  laudation  showered  upon  her,  consciously  in  want 
of  some  element  essential  for  her  success  is  supported  by 
the  very  curious  fact  that  from  1864  to  1869,  that  is  to 
say  through  nearly  one-quarter  of  her  whole  literary  career, 
she  devoted  herself  entirely  to  various  experiments  in  verse. 
She  was  so  preternaturally  intelligent  that  there  is  nothing 
unlikely  in  the  supposition  that  she  realized  what  was  her 
chief  want  as  a  writer  of  imaginative  prose.  She  claims, 
and  she  will  always  be  justified  in  claiming,  a  place  in  the 
splendid  roll  of  prominent  English  writers.  But  she  holds 
it  in  spite  of  a  certain  drawback  which  forbids  her  from 
ever  appearing  in  the  front  rank  as  a  great  writer.  Her 
prose  has  fine  qualities  of  force  and  wit,  it  is  pictorial  and 
persuasive,  but  it  misses  one  prime  but  rather  subtle  merit, 
it  never  sings.  The  masters  of  the  finest  English  are  those 
who  have  received  the  admonition  Cantate  Domino!  They 
sing  a  new  song  unto  the  Lord.  Among  George  Eliot's 
prose  contemporaries  there  were  several  who  obeyed  this 
command.     Ruskin,  for  instance,  above  all  the  Victorian 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

prose-writers,  sliouts  like;  the  morning-star.  It  is  the  pecu- 
liar gift  of  all  great  prosaists.  Take  so  rough  an  executant 
as  Hazlitt  :  "Ilarmer  Hill  stooped  with  all  its  pines,  to 
listen  to  a  poet,  as  he  passed  !  "  That  is  the  chanting 
faculty  in  prose,  which  all  the  greatest  men  possess;  but 
George  Eliot  has  no  trace  of  it,  except  sometimes,  faintly, 
in  the  sheer  fun  of  her  peasants'  conversation.  I  do  not 
question  that  she  felt  the  lack  herself,  and  that  it  was  this 
which,  subconsciously,  led  her  to  make  a  profound  study 
of  the  art  of  verse. 

She  hoped,  at  the  age  of  forty-four,  to  hammer  herself 
into  poetry  by  dint  of  sheer  labour  and  will-power.  She 
read  the  great  masters,  and  she  analysed  them  in  the  light 
of  prosodical  manuals.  In  187 1  she  told  Tennyson  that 
Professor  Sylvester's  "laws  for  verse-making  had  been 
useful  to  her."  Tennyson  replied,  "I  can't  understand 
that,"  and  no  wonder.  Sylvester  was  a  facetious  mathe- 
matician who  undertook  to  teach  the  art  of  poetry  in  so 
many  lessons.  George  Eliot  humbly  working  away  at 
Sylvester,  and  telling  Tennyson  that  she  was  finding  him 
"useful,"  and  Tennyson,  whose  melodies  pursued  him, 
like  bees  in  pursuit  of  a  bee-master,  expressing  a  gruff 
good-natured  scepticism — what  a  picture  it  raises !  But 
George  Eliot  persisted,  with  that  astounding  firmness  of 
application  which  she  had,  and  she  produced  quite  a  large 
body  of  various  verse.  She  wrote  a  Comtist  tragedy, 
The  Spanish  Gypsy,  of  which  I  must  speak  softly,  since, 
omnivorous  as  I  am,  I  have  never  been  able  to  swallow  it. 
But  she  wrote  many  other  things,  epics  and  sonnets  and 
dialogues  and  the  rest  of  them,  which  are  not  so  hard  to 
read.  She  actually  printed  privately  for  her  friends  two 
little  garlands,  Agatha  (1868)  and  Brother  and  Sister 
(1869),  which  are  the  only  "rare  issues"  of  hers  sought 
after  by  collectors,  for  she  was  not  given  to  bibliographical 
curiosity.  These  verses  and  many  others  she  polished  and 
re-wrote  with  untiring  assiduity,  and  in  1874  she  published 
a  substantial  volume  of  them.  I  have  been  reading  them 
over  again,  in  the  intense  wish  to  be  pleased  with  them, 
but  it  is  impossible — the  root  of  the  matter  is  not  in  them. 

12 


George  i  Eliot 

There  is  an  Arion,  which  is  stately  in  the  manner  of  Mar- 
vell.  The  end  of  this  lyric  is  tense  and  decisive,  but  there 
is  the  radical  absence  of  song.  George  Eliot  admired 
Wordsworth  very  much  :  occasionally  she  reproduces  very 
closely  the  duller  parts  of  The  Excursion.  In  the  long 
piece  of  blank  verse  called  A  College  Breakfast  Party, 
which  she  wrote  in  1874,  almost  all  Tennyson's  faults  are 
reconstructed  on  the  plan  of  the  Chinese  tailor  who  care- 
fully imitates  the  rents  in  the  English  coat  he  is  to  copy. 
There  is  a  Goethe-like  poem,  of  a  gnomic  order,  called 
Self  and  Life,  stuffed  with  valuable  thoughts  as  a  turkey 
is  stuffed  with  chestnuts. 

And  it  is  all  so  earnest  and  so  intellectual,  and  it  does 
so  much  credit  to  Sylvester.  After  long  consideration,  I 
have  come  to  the  conclusion  that  the  following  sonnet, 
from  Brother  and  Sister,  is  the  best  piece  of  sustained 
poetry  that  George  Eliot  achieved.  It  deals  with  the 
pathetic  and  beautiful  relations  which  existed  between  her 
and  her  elder  brother  Isaac,  the  Tom  Tulliver  of  The  Mill 
on  the  Floss: 

His  sorrow  was  my  sorrow,  and  his  joy 

Sent  little  leaps  and  laughs  through  all   my   frame; 
My  doll  seemed  lifeless,  and  no  girlish  toy 

Had  any  reason  when  my  brother  came. 
I  knelt  with  him  at  marbles,   marked  his   fling. 

Cut  the  ringed  stem  and  made  the  apple  drop. 
Or  watched  him  winding  close  the  spiral  string 

That  looped  the  orbits  of  the  humming-top. 
Grasped  by  such  fellowship  my  vagrant  thought 

Ceased  with  dream-fruit  dream-wishes  to  fulfil ; 
My  aery-picturing  fantasy  was  taught 

Subjection  to  the  harder,  truer  skill 
That  seeks  with  deeds  to  grave  a  thought-tracked  line, 
And  by   "  What  is  "    "  What  will  be  "   to  define. 

How  near  this  is  to  true  poetry,  and  yet  how  many  miles 
away  ! 

At  last  George  Eliot  seems  to  have  felt  that  she  could 
never  hope,  with  all  her  intellect,  to  catch  the  unconsidered 

13 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

music  which  God  lavishes  on  the  idle  linnet  and  the 
frivolous  chafiinch.  She  returned  to  her  own  strenuous 
business  of  buildinf^  up  the  psychological  novel.  She 
wrote  Middlemarch,  which  appeared  periodically  through- 
out 1872  and  as  a  book  early  the  following  year.  It  was 
received  with  great  enthusiasm,  as  marking  the  return  of 
a  popular  favourite  who  had  been  absent  for  several  years. 
Middlemarch  is  the  history  of  three  parallel  lives  of  women, 
who  "with  dim  lights  and  tangled  circumstances  tried  to 
shape  their  thought  and  deed  in  noble  agreement," 
although  "to  common  eyes  their  struggles  seemed  mere 
inconsistency  and  formlessness."  The  three  ineffectual 
St.  Theresas,  as  their  creator  conceived  them,  were 
Dorothea,  Rosamond,  and  Mary,  and  they  "shaped  the 
thought  and  deed  "  of  Casaubon  and  Ladislaw  and  Fred 
Vincy.  Middlemarch  is  constructed  with  unfailing  power, 
and  the  picture  of  commonplace  English  country  life  which 
it  gives  is  vivacious  after  a  mechanical  fashion,  but  all  the 
charm  of  the  early  stories  has  evaporated,  and  has  left 
behind  it  merely  a  residuum  of  unimaginative  satire.  The 
novel  is  a  very  remarkable  instance  of  elaborate  mental 
resources  misapplied,  and  genius  revolving,  with  tremend- 
ous machinery,  like  some  great  water-wheel,  while  no  water 
is  flowing  underneath  it. 

When  a  realist  loses  hold  on  reality  all  is  lost,  and  I 
for  one  can  find  not  a  word  to  say  in  favour  of  Daniel 
Deronda,  her  next  and  last  novel,  which  came  out,  with 
popularity  at  first  more  wonderful  than  ever,  in  1876.  But 
her  inner  circle  of  admirers  was  beginning  to  ask  one 
another  uneasily  whether  her  method  was  not  now  too 
calculated,  her  effects  too  plainly  premeditated.  The  inten- 
sity of  her  early  works  was  gone.  Readers  began  to 
resent  her  pedantry,  her  elaboration  of  allusions,  her  loss 
of  simplicity.  They  missed  the  vivid  rural  scenes  and  the 
flashes  of  delicious  humour  which  had  starred  the  serious 
pages  of  Adam  Bede  and  The  Mill  like  the  lemon-yellow 
pansies  and  potentillas  on  a  dark  Welsh  moor.  They  re- 
gretted the  ease  of  the  conversation  in  her  early  books, 
where  it  had  always  been  natural,  lively,  and  brief;  it  was 

14 


George  Eliot 

now  heavy  and  doctrinaire.  Tennyson  rebelled  against 
the  pompoLisness,  and  said,  in  his  blunt  way,  that  Jane 
Austen  knew  her  business  better,  a  courageous  thing  to  say 
in  Victorian  circles  fifty  years  ago.  Then  came  Theo- 
phrastus  Such,  a  collection  of  cumbrous  and  didactic 
essays  which  defy  perusal ;  and  finally,  soon  after  her 
death,  her  Correspondence,  a  terrible  disappointment  to  all 
her  admirers,  and  a  blow  from  which  even  the  worship 
of  Lord  Acton  never  recovered.  Of  George  Eliot  might 
have  been  repeated  Swift's  epitaph  on  Sir  John  Vanbrugh  : 

Lie  heavy   on   him,   earth,   for  he 
Laid  many  a  heavy  load  on  thee. 

It  was  the  fatal  error  of  George  Eliot,  so  admirable,  so 
elevated,  so  disinterested,  that  for  the  last  ten  years  of  her 
brief  literary  life  she  did  practically  nothing  but  lay  heavy 
loads  on  literature. 

On  the  whole,  then,  it  is  not  possible  to  regard  the  place 
which  George  Eliot  holds  in  English  literature  as  so  pro- 
minent a  one  as  was  rather  rashly  awarded  her  by  her 
infatuated  contemporaries.  It  is  the  inevitable  result  of 
"tall  talk"  about  likeness  to  Dante  and  Goethe  that  the 
figure  so  unduly  magnified  fails  to  support  such  compari- 
sons when  the  perspective  is  lengthened.  George  Eliot  is 
unduly  neglected  now,  but  it  is  the  revenge  of  time  on  her 
for  the  praise  expended  on  her  works  in  her  lifetime. 
Another  matter  which  militates  against  her  fame  to-day  is 
her  strenuous  solemnity.  One  of  the  philosophers  who 
knelt  at  the  footsteps  of  her  throne  said  that  she  was  "the 
emblem  of  a  generation  distracted  between  the  intense 
need  of  believing  and  the  difficulty  of  belief."  Well,  we 
happen  to  live,  fortunately  or  unfortunately  for  ourselves, 
in  a  generation  which  is  "distracted"  by  quite  other 
problems,  and  we  are  sheep  that  look  up  to  George  Eliot 
and  are  not  fed  by  her  ponderous  moral  aphorisms  and 
didactic  ethical  influence.  Perhaps  another  generation 
will  follow  us  which  will  be  more  patient,  and  students 
yet  unborn  will   read  her  gladly.     Let   us  never  forget, 

IS 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

however,  that  she  worked  with  all  her  heart  in  a  spirit  of 
perfect  honesty,  that  she  brought  a  vast  intelligence  to 
the  service  of  literature,  and  that  she  aimed  from  first  to 
last  at  the  loftiest  goal  of  intellectual  ambition.  Where 
she  failed,  it  was  principally  from  an  inborn  lack  of  charm, 
not  from  anything  ignoble  or  impure  in  her  mental  dis- 
position. After  all,  to  have  added  to  the  slender  body  of 
English  fiction  seven  novels  the  names  of  which  are  known 
to  every  cultivated  person  is  not  to  have  failed,  but  to  have 
signally,  if  only  relatively,  succeeded. 


i6 


HENRY    JAMES 


VOLUMINOUS  as  had  been  the  writings  of  Henry 
James  since  1875,  it  was  not  until  he  approached  the 
end  of  his  career  that  he  began  to  throw  any  light  on 
the  practical  events  and  social  adventures  of  his  own  career. 
He  had  occasionally  shown  that  he  could  turn  from  the 
psychology  of  imaginary  characters  to  the  record  of  real 
lives  without  losing  any  part  of  his  delicate  penetration  or 
his  charm  of  portraiture.  He  had,  in  particular,  written 
the  Life  of  Hawthorne  in  1879,  between  Daisy  Miller  and 
An  International  Episode ;  and  again  in  1903,  at  the  height 
of  his  latest  period,  he  had  produced  a  specimen  of  that 
period  in  his  elusive  and  parenthetical  but  very  beautiful 
so-called  Life  of  W.  W.  Story.  But  these  biographies 
threw  no  more  light  upon  his  own  adventures  than  did  his 
successive  volumes  of  critical  and  topographical  essays,  in 
which  the  reader  may  seek  long  before  he  detects  the 
sparkle  of  a  crumb  of  personal  fact.  Henry  James,  at  the 
age  of  seventy,  had  not  begun  to  reveal  himself  behind 
the  mask  which  spoke  in  the  tones  of  a  world  of  imaginary 
characters. 

So  saying,  I  do  not  forget  that  in  the  general  edition 
of  his  collected,  or  rather  selected,  novels  and  tales,  pub- 
lished from  1908  onwards,  Henry  James  prefixed  to  each 
volume  an  introduction  which  assumed  to  be  wholly  bio- 
graphical. He  yielded,  he  said,  "to  the  pleasure  of  placing 
on  record  the  circumstances  "  in  which  each  successive 
tale  was  written.  I  well  recollect  the  terms  in  which  he 
spoke  of  these  prefaces  before  he  began  to  write  them. 
They  were  to  be  full  and  confidential,  they  were  to  throw 
to  the  winds  all  restraints  of  conventional  reticence,  they 

17 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

were  to  take  us,  with  eyes  unbandaged,  into  the  inmost 
sanctum  of  his  soul.  They  appeared  at  last,  in  small 
print,  and  they  were  extremely  extensive,  but  truth  obliges 
me  to  say  that  I  found  them  highly  disappointing.  Con- 
stitutionally fitted  to  take  pleasure  in  the  accent  of  almost 
everything  that  Henry  James  ever  wrote,  I  have  to  confess 
that  these  prefaces  constantly  baffle  my  eagerness.  Not 
for  a  moment  would  I  deny  that  they  throw  interesting 
light  on  the  technical  craft  of  a  self-respecting  novelist, 
but  they  are  dry,  remote,  and  impersonal  to  a  strange 
degree.  It  is  as  though  the  author  felt  a  burning  desire 
to  confide  in  the  reader,  whom  he  positively  button-holes 
in  the  endeavour,  but  that  the  experience  itself  evades  him, 
fails  to  find  expression,  and  falls  stillborn,  while  other 
matters,  less  personal  and  less  important,  press  in  and  take 
their  place  against  the  author's  wish.  Henry  James  pro- 
posed, in  each  instance,  to  disclose  "the  contributive  value 
of  the  accessory  facts  in  a  given  artistic  case."  This  is, 
indeed,  what  we  require  in  the  history  or  the  autobiography 
of  an  artist,  whether  painter  or  musician  or  man  of  letters. 
But  this  includes  the  production  of  anecdotes,  of  salient 
facts,  of  direct  historical  statements,  which  Henry  James 
seemed  in  1908  to  be  completely  incapacitated  from  giving, 
so  that  really,  in  the  introductions  to  some  of  these  novels 
in  the  Collected  Edition,  it  is  difficult  to  know  what  the 
beloved  novelist  is  endeavouring  to  divulge.  He  becomes 
almost  chimasra  bombinating  in  a  vacuum. 

Had  we  lost  him  soon  after  the  appearance  of  the  latest 
of  these  prefaces — that  prefixed  to  The  Golden  Boivl,  in 
which  the  effort  to  reveal  something  which  is  not  revealed 
amounts  almost  to  an  agony — it  would  have  been  impos- 
sible to  reconstruct  the  life  of  Henry  James  by  the  closest 
examination  of  his  published  writings.  Ingenious  com- 
mentators would  have  pieced  together  conjectures  from 
such  tales  as  The  Altar  of  the  Dead  and  The  Lesson  of  the 
Master,  and  have  insisted,  more  or  less  plausibly,  on  their 
accordance  with  what  the  author  7nust  have  thought  or 
done,  endured  or  attempted.  But,  after  all,  these  would 
have  been  "conjectures,"  not  more  definitely  based  than 

18 


Henry  James 

what  bold  spirits  use  when  they  construct  Hves  of  Shake- 
speare, or,  for  that  matter,  of  Homer.  Fortunately,  in 
1913,  the  desire  to  place  some  particulars  of  the  career  of 
his  marvellous  brother  William  in  the  setting  of  his 
"immediate  native  and  domestic  air,"  led  Henry  James  to 
contemplate,  with  minuteness,  the  fading  memories  of  his 
own  childhood.  Starting  with  a  biographical  study  of 
William  James,  he  found  it  impossible  to  treat  the  family 
development  at  all  adequately  without  extending  the  survey 
to  his  own  growth  as  well,  and  thus,  at  the  age  of  seventy, 
Henry  became  for  the  first  time,  and  almost  unconsciously, 
an  autobiographer. 

He  had  completed  two  large  volumes  of  Memories,  and 
was  deep  in  a  third,  when  death  took  him  from  us.  A 
Small  Boy  and  Others  deals  with  such  extreme  discursive- 
ness as  is  suitable  in  a  collection  of  the  fleeting  impressions 
of  infancy,  from  his  birth  in  1843  to  his  all  but  fatal  attack 
of  typhus  fever  at  Boulogne-sur-Mer  in  (perhaps)  1857. 
I  say  "perhaps"  because  the  wanton  evasion  of  any  sort 
of  help  in  the  way  of  dates  is  characteristic  of  the  narrative, 
as  it  would  be  of  childish  memories.  The  next  instalment 
was  Notes  of  a  Son  and  Brother,  which  opens  in  i860,  a 
doubtful  period  of  three  years  being  leaped  over  lightly, 
and  closes — as  I  guess  from  an  allusion  to  George  Eliot's 
Spanish  Gypsy — in  1868.  The  third  instalment,  dictated 
in  the  autumn  of  1914  and  laid  aside  unfinished,  is  the 
posthumous  The  Middle  Years,  faultlessly  edited  by  the 
piety  of  Mr.  Percy  Lubbock  in  19 17.  Here  the  tale  is 
taken  up  in  1869,  and  is  occupied,  without  much  attempt  at 
chronological  order,  with  memories  of  two  years  in  London. 
As  Henry  James  did  not  revise,  or  perhaps  even  re-read, 
these  pages,  we  are  free  to  form  our  conclusion  as  to 
whether  he  would  or  would  not  have  vouchsafed  to  put 
their  disjected  parts  into  some  more  anatomical  order. 

Probably  he  would  not  have  done  so.  The  tendency  of 
his  genius  had  never  been,  and  at  the  end  was  less  than 
ever,  in  the  direction  of  concinnity.  He  repudiated 
arrangement,  he  wilfully  neglected  the  precise  adjustment 
of  parts.     The  three  autobiographical  volumes  will  always 

19 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

be  documents  precious  in  the  eyes  of  his  admirers.  They 
are  full  of  beauty  and  nobility,  they  exhibit  with  delicacy, 
and  sometimes  even  with  splendour,  the  qualities  of  his 
character.  But  it  would  be  absurd  to  speak  of  them  as 
easy  to  read,  or  as  fulfilling  what  is  demanded  from  an 
ordinary  biographer.  They  have  the  tone  of  Veronese, 
but  nothing  of  his  definition.  A  broad  canvas  is  spread 
before  us,  containing  many  figures  in  social  conjuncture. 
But  the  plot,  the  single  "story  "  which  is  being  told,  is 
drowned  in  misty  radiance.  Out  of  this  chiaroscuro  there 
leap  suddenly  to  our  vision  a  sumptuous  head  and  throat, 
a  handful  of  roses,  the  glitter  of  a  satin  sleeve,  but  it  is 
only  when  we  shut  our  eyes  and  think  over  what  we  have 
looked  at  that  any  coherent  plan  is  revealed  to  us,  or  that 
we  detect  any  species  of  composition.  It  is  a  case  which 
calls  for  editorial  help,  and  I  hope  that  when  the  three 
fragments  of  autobiography  are  reprinted  as  a  single 
composition,  no  prudery  of  hesitation  to  touch  the  sacred 
ark  will  prevent  the  editor  from  prefixing  a  skeleton 
chronicle  of  actual  dates  and  facts.  It  will  take  nothing 
from  the  dignity  of  the  luminous  reveries  in  their  original 
shape. 

Such  a  skeleton  will  tell  us  that  Henry  James  was  born 
at  2  Washington  Place,  New  York,  on  April  15th,  1843, 
and  that  he  was  the  second  child  of  his  parents,  the  elder 
by  one  year  being  William,  who  grew  up  to  be  the  most 
eminent  philosopher  whom  America  has  produced.  Their 
father,  Henry  James  the  elder,  was  himself  a  philosopher, 
whose  ideas,  which  the  younger  Henry  frankly  admitted 
to  be  beyond  his  grasp,  were  expounded  by  William  James 
in  1884,  in  a  preface  to  their  father's  posthumous  papers. 
Henry  was  only  one  year  old  when  the  family  paid  a  long 
visit  to  Paris,  but  his  earliest  recollections  were  of  Albany, 
whence  the  Jameses  migrated  to  New  York  until  1855. 
They  then  transferred  their  home  to  Europe  for  three  years, 
during  which  time  the  child  Henry  imbibed  what  he  after- 
wards called  "the  European  virus."  In  1855  he  was  sent 
to  Geneva  for  purposes  of  education,  which  were  soon 
abandoned,  and  the  whole  family  began  an  aimless  wander- 

20 


Henry  James 

ing  through  London,  Paris,  BouIogne-sur-Mer,  Newport, 
Geneva,  and  America  again,  nothing  but  the  Civil  War 
sufficing  to  root  this  fugitive  household  in  one  abiding 
home. 

Henry  James's  health  forced  him  to  be  a  spectator  of 
the  war,  in  which  his  younger  brothers  fought.  He  went 
to  Harvard  in  1862  to  study  law,  but  was  now  beginning 
to  feel  a  more  and  more  irresistible  call  to  take  up  letters 
as  a  profession,  and  the  Harvard  Law  School  left  little 
or  no  direct  impression  upon  him.  He  formed  a  close  and 
valuable  friendship  with  William  Dean  Howells,  seven 
years  his  senior,  and  the  pages  of  the  Atlantic  Monthly, 
of  which  Howells  was  then  assistant  editor,  were  open  to 
him  from  1865.  He  lived  for  the  next  four  years  in  very 
poor  health,  and  with  no  great  encouragement  from  him- 
self or  others,  always  excepting  Howells,  at  Cambridge, 
Massachusetts.  Early  in  1869  he  ventured  to  return  to 
Europe,  where  he  spent  fifteen  months  in  elegant  but 
fruitful  vagabondage.  There  was  much  literary  work 
done,  most  of  which  he  carefully  suppressed  in  later  life. 
The  reader  will,  however,  discover,  tucked  away  in  the 
thirteenth  volume  of  the  Collected  Edition,  a  single  waif 
from  this  rejected  epoch,  the  tale  called  A  Passionate 
Pilgrim,  written  on  his  return  to  America  in  1870.  This 
visit  to  Europe  absolutely  determined  his  situation ;  his 
arrival  in  New  York  stimulated  and  tortured  his  nostalgia 
for  the  old  world,  and  in  May,  1872,  he  flew  back  here 
once  more  to  the  European  enchantment. 

Here,  practically,  the  biographical  information  respect- 
ing Henry  James  which  has  hitherto  been  given  to  the 
world  ceases,  for  the  fragment  of  The  Middle  Years,  so 
far  as  can  be  gathered,  contains  few  recollections  which 
can  be  dated  later  than  his  thirtieth  year.  It  was  said  of 
Marivaux  that  he  cultivated  no  faculty  but  that  de  ne  vivre 
que  pour  voir  et  pour  entendre.  In  a  similar  spirit  Henry 
James  took  up  his  dwelling  in  fashionable  London  lodgings 
in  March,  1869.  He  had  come  from  America  with  the 
settled  design  of  making  a  profound  study  of  English 
manners,  and  there  were  two  aspects  of  the  subject  which 
c  21 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

stood  GUI  for  him  above  all  others.  One  of  these  was  the 
rural  beauty  of  ancient  country  places,  the  other  was  the 
magnitude — "the  inconceivable  immensity,"  as  he  put  it 
— of  London.  He  told  his  sister,  "The  place  sits  on  you, 
broods  on  you,  stamps  on  you  with  the  feet  of  its  myriad 
bipeds  and  quadrupeds."  From  his  lodgings  in  Half  Moon 
Street,  quiet  enough  in  themselves,  he  had  the  turmoil  of 
the  West  End  at  his  elbow,  Piccadilly,  Park  Lane,  St. 
James's  Street,  all  within  the  range  of  a  five  minutes'  stroll. 
He  plunged  into  the  vortex  with  incredible  gusto,  "knock- 
ing about  in  a  quiet  way  and  deeply  enjoying  my  little 
adventures."  This  was  his  first  mature  experience  of 
London,  of  which  he  remained  until  the  end  of  his  life 
perhaps  the  most  infatuated  student,  the  most  "passionate 
pilgrim,"  that  America  has  ever  sent  us. 

But  his  health  was  still  poor,  and  for  his  constitution's 
sake  he  went  in  the  summer  of  1869  to  Great  Malvern. 
He  went  alone,  and  it  is  to  be  remarked  of  him  that,  social 
as  he  was,  and  inclined  to  a  deep  indulgence  in  the  com- 
pany of  his  friends,  his  habit  of  life  was  always  in  the 
main  a  solitary  one.  He  had  no  constant  associates,  and 
he  did  not  shrink  from  long  periods  of  isolation,  which 
he  spent  in  reading  and  writing,  but  also  in  a  concentrated 
contemplation  of  the  passing  scene,  whatever  it  might  be. 
It  was  alone  that  he  now  made  a  tour  of  the  principal 
English  cathedral  and  university  towns,  expatiating  to 
himself  on  the  perfection  of  the  weather — "the  dozen  ex- 
quisite days  of  the  English  year,  days  stamped  with  a 
purity  unknown  in  climates  where  fine  weather  is  cheap." 
It  was  alone  that  he  made  acquaintance  with  Oxford,  of 
which  city  he  became  at  once  the  impassioned  lover  which 
he  continued  to  be  to  the  end,  raving  from  Boston  in  1870 
of  the  supreme  gratifications  of  Oxford  as  "the  most 
dignified  and  most  educated  "  of  the  cradles  of  our  race. 
It  was  alone  that  during  these  enchanting  weeks  he  made 
himself  acquainted  with  the  unimagined  loveliness  of  Eng- 
lish hamlets  buried  in  immemorial  leafage  and  whispered 
to  by  meandering  rivulets  in  the  warm  recesses  of  antiquity. 
These,   too,    found  in   Henry  James  a   worshipper  more 

22 


Henry  James 

ardent,  it  may  almost  be  averred,  than  any  other  who  had 
crossed  the  Atlantic  to  their  shrine. 

Having  formed  his  basis  for  the  main  construction  of 
his  English  studies,  Henry  James  passed  over  to  the  Con- 
tinent, and  conducted  a  similar  pilgrimage  of  entranced 
obsession  through  Switzerland  and  Italy.  His  wanderings, 
"rapturous  and  solitary,"  were,  as  in  England,  hampered 
by  no  social  engagement;  "I  see  no  people  to  speak  of," 
he  wrote,  "or  for  that  matter  to  speak  to."  He  returned 
to  America  in  April,  1870,  at  the  close  of  a  year  which 
proved  critical  in  his  career,  and  which  laid  its  stamp  on 
the  whole  of  his  future  work.  He  had  been  kindly  received 
in  artistic  and  literary  circles  in  London ;  he  had  conversed 
with  Ruskin,  with  William  Morris,  with  Aubrey  de  Vere, 
but  it  is  plain  that  while  he  observed  the  peculiarities  of 
these  eminent  men  with  the  closest  avidity,  he  made  no 
impression  whatever  upon  them.  The  time  for  Henry 
James  to  "make  an  impression  "  on  others  was  not  come 
yet;  he  was  simply  the  well-bred,  rather  shy,  young 
American  invalid,  with  excellent  introductions,  who 
crossed  the  path  of  English  activities,  almost  without 
casting  a  shadow.  He  had  published  no  book;  he  had 
no  distinct  calling;  he  was  a  deprecating  and  punctilious 
young  stranger  from  somewhere  in  Massachusetts,  im- 
mature-looking for  all  his  seven-and-twenty  years. 

Some  further  uneventful  seasons,  mainly  spent  in 
America  but  diversified  by  tours  in  Germany  and  Italy, 
bring  us  to  1875,  when  Henry  James  came  over  from 
Cambridge  with  the  definite  project,  at  last,  of  staying  in 
Europe  "for  good."  He  took  rooms  in  Paris,  at  29  Rue 
de  Luxembourg,  and  he  penetrated  easily  into  the  very 
exclusive  literary  society  which  at  that  time  revolved 
around  Flaubert  and  Edmond  de  Goncourt.  This  year 
in  Paris  was  another  highly  critical  period  in  Henry 
James's  intellectual  history.  He  was  still,  at  the  mature 
age  of  thirty-two,  almost  an  amateur  in  literature,  having 
been  content,  up  to  that  time,  to  produce  scarcely  anything 
which  his  mature  taste  did  not  afterwards  repudiate.  The 
Passionate  Pilgrim  (1870),  of  which  I  have  spoken  above, 

23 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

is  (he  only  waif  and  stray  of  the  prc-1873  years  which  he 
has  permitted  to  survive.  The  first  edition  of  this  short 
story  is  now  not  easy  of  r(;ference,  and  I  have  not  seen  it; 
the  reprint  of  1908  is  obviously,  and  is  doubtless  vigor- 
ously, re-handled.  Enough,  however,  remains  of  what 
must  he  original  to  show  that,  in  a  rather  crude,  and 
indeed  almost  iiystcrical  form,  the  qualities  of  Henry 
James's  genius  were,  in  1869,  what  they  continued  to  be 
in  !(>(>>  He  lias  conquered,  however,  in  A  Passionate 
Pilgrim,  no  command  yet  over  his  enthusiasm,  his  delicate 
sense  of  beauty,  his  apprehension  of  the  exquisite  colour 
of  anticjuity. 

I'rom  the  French  associates  of  this  time  he  derived 
practical  help  in  his  profession,  though  without  their  being 
aware  of  what  they  gave  him.  He  was  warmly  attracted 
to  Gustave  Flaubert,  who  had  just  published  La  Tentation 
de  St.  Antoine,  a  dazzled  admiration  of  which  was  the 
excuse  which  threw  the  young  American  at  the  feet  of  the 
Rouen  giant.  This  particular  admiration  dwindled  with 
the  passage  of  time,  but  Henry  James  continued  faithful 
to  the  author  of  Madame  Bovary.  It  was  Turgenev  who 
introduced  him  to  Flaubert,  from  whom  he  passed  to  Guy 
de  Maupassant,  then  an  athlete  of  four-and-twenty,  and 
still  scintillating  in  that  blaze  of  juvenile  virility  which 
always  fascinated  Henry  James.  In  the  train  of  Edmond 
de  Goncourt  came  Zola,  vociferous  over  his  late  tribulation 
of  having  L'Assommoir  stopped  in  its  serial  issue; 
Alphonse  Daudet,  whose  recent  Jack  was  exercising  over 
tens  of  thousands  of  readers  the  tyranny  of  tears;  and 
Francois  Coppee,  the  almost  exact  coeval  of  Henry  James, 
and  now  author  of  a  Luthier  de  Cremone,  which  had 
placed  him  high  among  French  poets.  That  the  young 
American,  with  no  apparent  claim  to  attention  except  the 
laborious  perfection  of  his  French  speech,  was  welcomed 
and  ultimately  received  on  terms  of  intimacy  in  this  the 
most  exclusive  of  European  intellectual  circles  is  curious. 
Henry  James  was  accustomed  to  deprecate  the  notion  that 
these  Frenchmen  took  the  least  interest  in  him:  "they 
have  never  read  a  line  of  me,  they  have  never  even  per- 

24 


Henry  James 

suaded  themselves  that  there  was  a  line  of  me  which  any- 
one could  read,"  he  once  said  to  me.  How  should  they, 
poor  charming  creatures,  in  their  self-sufficing  Latin  inten- 
sity, know  what  or  whether  some  barbarian  had  remotely 
"written"?  But  this  does  not  end  the  marvel,  because, 
read  or  not  read,  there  was  Henry  James  among  them, 
affectionately  welcomed,  talked  to  familiarly  about  "tech- 
nique," and  even  about  "sales,"  like  a  fellow-craftsman. 
There  must  evidently  have  developed  by  this  time  some- 
thing modestly  "impressive"  about  him,  and  I  cannot 
doubt  that  these  Parisian  masters  of  language  more  or  less 
dimly  divined  that  he  too  was,  in  some  medium  not  by 
them  to  be  penetrated,  a  master. 

After  this  fruitful  year  in  Paris,  the  first  result  of  which 
was  the  publication  in  London  of  his  earliest  surviving 
novel,  Roderick  Hudson,  and  the  completion  of  The 
American,  Henry  James  left  his  "glittering,  charming, 
civilized  Paris "  and  settled  in  London.  He  submitted 
himself,  as  he  wrote  to  his  brother  William  in  1878,  "with- 
out reserve  to  that  Londonizing  process  of  which  the  effect 
is  to  convince  you  that,  having  lived  here,  you  may,  if 
need  be,  abjure  civilization  and  bury  yourself  in  the  coun- 
try, but  may  not,  in  pursuit  of  civilization,  live  in  any 
smaller  town."  He  plunged  deeply  into  the  study  of 
London,  externally  and  socially,  and  into  the  production 
of  literature,  in  which  he  was  now  as  steadily  active  as  he 
was  elegantly  proficient.  These  novels  of  his  earliest 
period  have  neither  the  profundity  nor  the  originality  of 
those  of  his  middle  and  final  periods,  but  they  have  an 
exquisite  freshness  of  their  own,  and  a  workmanship  the 
lucidity  and  logic  of  which  he  owed  in  no  small  measure 
to  his  conversations  with  Daudet  and  Maupassant,  and  to 
his,  at  that  time  almost  exclusive,  reading  of  the  finest 
French  fiction.  He  published  The  American  in  1877,  The 
Europeans  and  Daisy  Miller  in  1878,  and  An  International 
Episode  in  1879.  He  might  advance  in  stature  and 
breadth ;  he  might  come  to  disdain  the  exiguous  beauty  of 
these  comparatively  juvenile  books,  but  now  at  all  events 
were    clearly    revealed   all    the    qualities   which    were    to 

25 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

develop  later,  and  to  make  Henry  James  unique  among 
writers  of  Anglo-Saxon  race. 

His  wclrome  into  English  society  was  remarkable  if 
wo  reflect  that  he  seemed  to  have  little  to  give  in  return  for 
what  it  offered  except  his  social  adaptability,  his  pleasant 
and  still  formal  amenity,  and  his  admirable  capacity  for 
listening.  It  cannot  be  repeated  too  clearly  that  the  Henry 
James  of  those  early  days  had  very  little  of  the  impressive- 
ness  of  his  later  manner.  He  went  everywhere,  sedately, 
watchfully,  graciously,  but  never  prominently.  In  the 
winter  of  1878-79  it  is  recorded  that  he  dined  out  in  London 
107  times,  but  it  is  highly  questionable  whether  this  amaz- 
ing assiduity  at  the  best  dinner-tables  will  be  found  to 
have  impressed  itself  on  any  Greville  or  Crabb  Robinson 
who  was  taking  notes  at  the  time.  He  was  strenuously 
living  up  to  his  standard,  "my  charming  little  standard 
of  wit,  of  grace,  of  good  manners,  of  vivacity,  of  urbanity, 
of  intelligence,  of  what  makes  an  easy  and  natural  style 
of  intercourse."  He  was  watching  the  rather  gross  and 
unironic,  but  honest  and  vigorous,  English  upper-middle- 
class  of  that  day  with  mingled  feelings,  in  which  curiosity 
and  a  sort  of  remote  sympathy  took  a  main  part.  At  107 
London  dinners  he  observed  the  ever-shifting  pieces  of  the 
general  kaleidoscope  with  tremendous  acuteness,  and 
although  he  thought  their  reds  and  yellows  would  have 
been  improved  by  a  slight  infusion  of  the  Florentine 
harmony,  on  the  whole  he  w-as  never  weary  of  watching 
their  evolutions.  In  this  way  the  years  slipped  by,  while 
he  made  a  thousand  acquaintances  and  a  dozen  durable 
friendships.  It  is  a  matter  of  pride  and  happiness  to  me 
that  I  am  able  to  touch  on  one  of  the  latter. 

It  is  often  curiously  difficult  for  intimate  friends,  who 
have  the  impression  in  later  years  that  they  must  always 
have  known  one  another,  to  recall  the  occasion  and  the 
place  where  they  first  met.  That  was  the  case  with  Henry 
James  and  me.  Several  times  we  languidly  tried  to  recover 
those  particulars,  but  without  success.  I  think,  however, 
that  it  was  at  some  dinner-party  that  we  first  met,  and  as 
the  incident  is  dubiously  connected  with  the  publication 

26 


Henry  James 

of  the  Hawthorne  in  1879,  and  with  Mr.  (now  Lord) 
Morley,  whom  we  both  frequently  saw  at  that  epoch,  I  am 
pretty  sure  that  the  event  took  place  early  in  1880.  The 
acquaintance,  however,  did  not  "ripen,"  as  people  say, 
until  the  summer  of  1882,  when  in  connexion  with  an 
article  on  the  drawings  of  George  Du  Maurier,  which  I 
was  anxious  Henry  James  should  write — having  heard 
him  express  himself  with  high  enthusiasm  regarding  these 
works  of  art — he  invited  me  to  go  to  see  him  and  to  talk 
over  the  project.  I  found  him,  one  sunshiny  afternoon, 
in  his  lodgings  on  the  first  floor  of  No.  3  Bolton  Street, 
at  the  Piccadilly  end  of  the  street,  where  the  houses  look 
askew  into  Green  Park.  Here  he  had  been  living  ever 
since  he  came  over  from  France  in  1876,  and  the  situation 
was  eminently  characteristic  of  the  impassioned  student  of 
London  life  and  haunter  of  London  society  which  he  had 
now  become. 

Stretched  on  the  sofa  and  apologizing  for  not  rising  to 
greet  me,  his  appearance  gave  me  a  little  shock,  for  I  had 
not  thought  of  him  as  an  invalid.  He  hurriedly  and  rather 
evasively  declared  that  he  was  not  that,  but  that  a  muscular 
weakness  of  his  spine  obliged  him,  as  he  said,  "to  assume 
the  horizontal  posture  "  during  some  hours  of  every  day 
in  order  to  bear  the  almost  unbroken  routine  of  evening 
engagements.  I  think  that  this  weakness  gradually  passed 
away,  but  certainly  for  many  years  it  handicapped  his 
activity.  I  recall  his  appearance,  seen  then  for  the  first 
time  by  daylight;  there  was  something  shadowy  about  it, 
the  face  framed  in  dark  brown  hair  cut  short  in  the  Paris 
fashion,  and  in  equally  dark  beard,  rather  loose  and 
"fluffy."  He  was  in  deep  mourning,  his  mother  having 
died  five  or  six  months  earlier,  and  he  himself  having  but 
recently  returned  from  a  melancholy  visit  to  America, 
where  he  had  unwillingly  left  his  father,  who  seemed  far 
from  well.  His  manner  was  grave,  extremely  courteous, 
but  a  little  formal  and  frightened,  which  seemed  strange 
in  a  man  living  in  constant  communication  with  the  world. 
Our  business  regarding  Du  Maurier  was  soon  concluded, 
and  James  talked  with  increasing  ease,  but  always  with  a 

27 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

punctilious  hesitancy,  about  Paris,  where  he  seemed,  to 
my  dazzlement,  to  know  even  a  larger  number  of  persons 
of  distinction  than  he  did  in  London. 

He  promised,  before  I  left,  to  return  my  visit,  but  news 
of  tiie  alarmint;  illness  of  his  father  called  him  suddenly 
to  America.  Me  wrote  to  me  from  Boston  in  April,  1883, 
hut  he  did  not  return  to  London  until  the  autumn  of  that 
year.  Our  intercourse  was  then  resumed,  and,  immedi- 
ately, on  the  familiar  footing  which  it  preserved,  without 
an  hour's  abatement,  until  the  sad  moment  of  his  fatal 
illness.  When  he  returned  to  Bolton  Street — this  was  in 
August,  1883 — he  had  broken  all  the  ties  which  held  him 
to  residence  in  America,  a  country  which,  as  it  turned 
out,  he  was  not  destined  to  revisit  for  more  than  twenty 
years.  By  this  means  Henry  James  became  a  homeless 
man  in  a  peculiar  sense,  for  he  continued  to  be  looked 
upon  as  a  foreigner  in  London,  while  he  seemed  to  have 
lost  citizenship  in  the  United  States.  It  was  a  little  later 
than  this  that  that  somewhat  acidulated  patriot,  Colonel 
Higginson,  in  reply  to  someone  who  said  that  Henry 
James  was  a  cosmopolitan,  remarked,  "Hardly!  for  a 
cosmopolitan  is  at  home  even  in  his  own  country  !  "  This 
condition  made  James,  although  superficially  gregarious, 
essentially  isolated,  and  though  his  books  were  numerous 
and  were  greatly  admired,  they  were  tacitly  ignored  alike 
in  summaries  of  English  and  of  American  current  litera- 
ture. There  was  no  escape  from  this  dilemma.  Henry 
James  was  equally  determined  not  to  lay  down  his 
American  birthright  and  not  to  reside  in  America.  Every 
year  of  his  exile,  therefore,  emphasized  the  fact  of  his 
separation  from  all  other  Anglo-Saxons,  and  he  endured, 
in  the  world  of  letters,  the  singular  fate  of  being  a  man 
without  a  country. 

The  collection  of  his  private  letters,  therefore,  which  has 
just  been  published  under  the  sympathetic  editorship  of  Mr. 
Percy  Lubbock,  reveals  the  adventures  of  an  author  who, 
long  excluded  from  two  literatures,  is  now  eagerly  claimed 
by  both  of  them,  and  it  displays  those  movements  of  a  char- 
acter of  great  energy  and  singular  originalitv  which  cir- 

28 


Henry  James 

cumstances  have  hitherto  concealed  from  curiosity.  There 
was  very  little  on  the  surface  of  his  existence  to  bear 
evidence  to  the  passionate  intensity  of  the  stream  beneath. 
This  those  who  have  had  the  privilege  of  seeing  his  letters 
know  is  marvellously  revealed  in  his  private  correspond- 
ence. A  certain  change  in  his  life  was  brought  about  by 
the  arrival  in  1885  of  his  sister  Alice,  who,  in  now  con- 
firmed ill-health,  was  persuaded  to  make  Bournemouth 
and  afterwards  Leamington  her  home.  He  could  not 
share  her  life,  but  at  all  events  he  could  assiduously 
diversify  it  by  his  visits,  and  Bournemouth  had  a  second 
attraction  for  him  in  the  presence  of  Robert  Louis  Steven- 
son, with  whom  he  had  by  this  time  formed  one  of  the 
closest  of  his  friendships.  Stevenson's  side  of  the  corre- 
spondence has  long  been  known,  and  it  is  one  of  the  main 
attractions  which  Mr.  Lubbock  held  out  to  his  readers 
that  Henry  James's  letters  to  Stevenson  are  now  published. 
No  episode  of  the  literary  history  of  the  time  is  more 
fascinating  than  the  interchange  of  feeling  between  these 
two  great  artists.  The  death  of  Stevenson,  nine  years 
later  than  their  first  meeting,  though  long  anticipated, 
fell  upon  Henry  James  with  a  shock  which  he  found  at 
first  scarcely  endurable.  For  a  long  time  afterwards  he 
could  not  bring  himself  to  mention  the  name  of  R.  L.  S. 
without  a  distressing  agitation. 

In  1886  the  publication  of  The  Bostonians,  a  novel 
which  showed  an  advance  in  direct  or,  as  it  was  then 
styled,  "realistic"  painting  of  modern  society,  increased 
the  cleft  which  now  divided  him  from  his  native  country, 
for  The  Bostonians  was  angrily  regarded  as  satirizing 
not  merely  certain  types,  but  certain  recognizable  figures 
in  Massachusetts,  and  that  with  a  suggestive  daring  which 
was  unusual.  Henry  James,  intent  upon  making  a  vivid 
picture,  and  already  perhaps  a  little  out  of  touch  with 
American  sentiment,  was  indignant  at  the  reception  of  this 
book,  which  he  ultimately,  to  my  great  disappointment, 
omitted  from  his  Collected  Edition,  for  reasons  which  he 
gave  in  a  long  letter  to  myself.  Hence,  as  his  works  now 
appear,  The  Princess  Casamassima,  of  1886,  an  essentially 

29 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

London  adventure  story,  takes  its  place  as  the  earliest  of 
the  novels  of  his  second  period,  although  preceded  by 
admirable  short  tales  in  that  manner,  the  most  character- 
istic of  which  is  doubtless  The  Author  of  Beltrajfio  (1885). 
This  exemplifies  the  custom  he  had  now  adopted  of  seizing 
an  incident  reported  to  him,  often  a  very  slight  and  bald 
affair,  and  weaving  round  it  a  thick  and  glittering  web  of 
silken  fancy,  just  as  the  worm  winds  round  the  unsightly 
chrysalis  its  graceful  robe  of  gold.  I  speak  of  The  Author 
of  Beltraffio,  and  after  thirty-five  years  I  may  confess  that 
this  extraordinarily  vivid  story  was  woven  around  a  dark 
incident  in  the  private  life  of  an  eminent  author  known 
to  us  both,  which  I,  having  told  Henry  James  in  a  moment 
of  levity,  was  presently  horrified  and  even  sensibly  alarmed 
to  see  thus  pinnacled  in  the  broad  light  of  day. 

After  exhausting  at  last  the  not  very  shining  amenities 
of  his  lodgings  in  Bolton  Street,  where  all  was  old  and 
dingy,  he  went  westward  in  1886  into  Kensington,  and 
settled  in  a  flat  which  was  both  new  and  bright,  at  34  De 
Vere  Gardens,  Kensington,  where  he  began  a  novel  called 
The  Tragic  Muse,  on  which  he  expended  an  immense 
amount  of  pains.  He  was  greatly  wearied  by  the  effort, 
and  not  entirely  satisfied  with  the  result.  He  determined, 
as  he  said,  "to  do  nothing  but  short  lengths"  for  the 
future,  and  he  devoted  himself  to  the  execution  of  contes. 
But  even  the  art  of  the  short  story  presently  yielded  to  a 
new  and,  it  must  be  confessed,  a  deleterious  fascination, 
that  of  the  stage.  He  was  disappointed — he  made  no 
secret  to  his  friends  of  his  disillusion — in  the  commercial 
success  of  his  novels,  which  was  inadequate  to  his  needs. 
I  believe  that  he  greatly  over-estimated  these  needs,  and 
that  at  no  time  he  was  really  pressed  by  the  want  of  money. 
But  he  thought  that  he  was,  and  in  his  anxiety  he  turned 
to  the  theatre  as  a  market  in  which  to  earn  a  fortune.  Little 
has  hitherto  been  revealed  with  regard  to  this  "sawdust 
and  orange-peel  phase  "  (as  he  called  it)  in  Henry  James's 
career,  but  it  cannot  be  ignored  any  longer.  The  memories 
of  his  intimate  friends  are  stored  with  its  incidents,  his 
letters  will  be  found  to  be  full  of  it. 


Henry  James 

Henry  James  wrote,  between  1889  and  1894,  seven  or 
eight  plays,  on  each  of  which  he  expended  an  infinitude 
of  pains  and  mental  distress.  At  the  end  of  this  period, 
unwillingly  persuaded  at  last  that  all  his  agony  was  in 
vain,  and  that  he  could  never  secure  fame  and  fortune, 
or  even  a  patient  hearing  from  the  theatre-going  public 
by  his  dramatic  work,  he  abandoned  the  hopeless  struggle. 
He  was  by  temperament  little  fitted  to  endure  the  disap- 
pointments and  delays  which  must  always  attend  the  course 
of  a  dramatist  who  has  not  conquered  a  position  which 
enables  him  to  browbeat  the  tyrants  behind  the  stage. 
Henry  James  was  punctilious,  ceremonious,  and  precise ; 
it  is  not  to  be  denied  that  he  was  apt  to  be  hasty  in  taking 
offence,  and  not  very  ready  to  overlook  an  impertinence. 
The  whole  existence  of  the  actor  is  lax  and  casual;  the 
manager  is  the  capricious  leader  of  an  irresponsible  band 
of  egotists.  Henry  James  lost  no  occasion  of  dwelling, 
in  private  conversation,  on  this  aspect  of  an  amiable  and 
entertaining  profession.  He  was  not  prepared  to  accept 
young  actresses  at  their  own  valuation,  and  the  happy-go- 
lucky  democracy  of  the  "mimes,"  as  he  bracketed  both 
sexes,  irritated  him  to  the  verge  of  frenzy. 

It  was,  however,  with  a  determination  to  curb  his  im- 
patience, and  with  a  conviction  that  he  could  submit  his 
idiosyncrasies  to  what  he  called  the  "passionate  economy  " 
of  play-writing,  that  he  began,  in  1889,  to  dedicate  himself 
to  the  drama,  excluding  for  the  time  being  all  other  con- 
siderations. He  went  over  to  Paris  in  the  winter  of  that 
year,  largely  to  talk  over  the  stage  with  Alphonse  Daudet 
and  Edmond  de  Goncourt,  and  he  returned  to  put  the 
finishing  touches  on  The  American,  a  dramatic  version 
of  one  of  his  earliest  novels.  He  finished  this  play  at  the 
Palazzo  Barbaro,  the  beautiful  home  of  his  friends,  the 
Daniel  Curtises,  in  Venice,  in  June,  1890,  thereupon 
taking  a  long  holiday,  one  of  the  latest  of  his  extended 
Italian  tours,  through  Venetia  and  Tuscany.  Edward 
Compton  had  by  this  time  accepted  The  American,  being 
attracted  by  his  own  chances  in  the  part  of  Christopher 
Newman.     When   Henry  James  reappeared   in   London, 

31 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

and  particularly  when  the  rehearsals  began,  we  all  noticed 
how  deeply  the  theatrical  virus  had  penetrated  his  nature. 
His  excitement  swelled  until  the  evening  of  January  3rd, 
1891,  when  The  American  was  acted  at  vSouthport  by 
Compton's  company  in  anticipation  of  its  appearance  in 
London.  Henry  James  was  kind  enough  to  wish  me  to 
go  down  on  this  occasion  with  him  to  Southport,  but  it 
was  not  possible.  On  the  afternoon  of  the  ordeal  he  wrote 
to  me  from  the  local  hotel  :  "After  eleven  o'clock  tonight 
I  may  be  the  world's — you  know — and  I  may  be  the  under- 
taker's. I  count  upon  you  and  your  wife  both  to  spend 
this  evening  in  fasting,  silence,  and  supplication.  I  will 
send  you  a  word  in  the  morning,  a  wire  if  I  can."  He 
was  "so  nervous  that  I  miswrite  and  misspell." 

The  result,  in  the  provinces,  of  this  first  experiment  was 
not  decisive.  It  is  true  that  he  told  Robert  Louis  Steven- 
son that  he  was  enjoying  a  success  which  made  him  blush. 
But  the  final  result  in  London,  where  The  American  was 
not  played  until  September,  1891,  was  only  partly  en- 
couraging. Henry  James  was  now  cast  down  as  unreason- 
ably as  he  had  been  uplifted.  He  told  me  that  "the  strain, 
the  anxiety,  the  peculiar  form  and  colour  of  the  ordeal 
(not  to  be  divined  in  the  least  in  advance)  "  had  "sickened 
him  to  death."  He  used  language  of  the  most  picturesque 
extravagance  about  the  "purgatory  "  of  the  performances, 
which  ran  at  the  Opera  Comique  for  two  months.  There 
was  nothing  in  the  mediocre  fortunes  of  this  play  to  decide 
the  questions  whether  Henry  James  was  or  was  not  justified 
in  abandoning  all  other  forms  of  art  for  the  drama.  We 
endeavoured  to  persuade  him  that,  on  the  whole,  he  was 
not  justified,  but  he  swept  our  arguments  aside,  and  he 
devoted  himself  wholly  to  the  infatuation  of  his  sterile 
task. 

The  American  had  been  dramatized  from  a  published 
novel.  Henry  James  now  thought  that  he  should  do  better 
with  original  plots,  and  he  wrote  two  comedies,  the  one 
named  Tenants  and  the  other  Disengaged,  of  each  of 
which  he  formed  high  expectations.  But,  although  they 
were  submitted  to  several  managers,  who  gave  them  their 

3« 


Henry  James 

customary  loitering  and  fluctuating  attention,  they  were 
in  every  case  ultimately  refused.  Each  refusal  plunged 
the  dramatist  into  the  lowest  pit  of  furious  depression, 
from  which  he  presently  emerged  with  freshly-kindled 
hopes.  Like  the  moralist,  he  never  was  but  always  to  be 
blest.  The  Albiim  and  The  Reprobate — there  is  a  melan- 
choly satisfaction  in  giving  life  to  the  mere  names  of  these 
stillborn  children  of  his  brain — started  with  wild  hopes 
and  suffered  from  the  same  complete  failure  to  satisfy  the 
caprice  of  the  managers.  At  the  close  of  1893,  after  one 
of  these  "sordid  developments,"  he  made  up  his  mind  to 
abandon  the  struggle.  But  George  Alexander  promised 
that,  if  he  would  but  persevere,  he  really  and  truly  would 
produce  him  infallibly  at  no  distant  date,  and  poor  Henry 
James  could  not  but  persevere.  "I  mean  to  wage  this  war 
ferociously  for  one  year  more,"  and  he  composed,  with 
infinite  agony  and  deliberation,  the  comedy  of  Guy 
Domvile. 

The  night  of  January  5th,  1895,  was  the  most  tragical 
in  Henry  James's  career.  His  hopes  and  fears  had  been 
strung  up  to  the  most  excruciating  point,  and  I  think  that 
I  have  never  witnessed  such  agonies  of  parturition.  Guy 
Domvile — which  has  never  been  printed — was  a  delicate 
and  picturesque  play,  of  which  the  only  disadvantage  that 
I  could  discover  was  that  instead  of  having  a  last  scene 
which  tied  up  all  the  threads  in  a  neat  conclusion,  it  left 
all  those  threads  loose  as  they  would  be  in  life.  George 
Alexander  was  sanguine  of  success,  and  to  do  Henry  James 
honour  such  a  galaxy  of  artistic,  literary,  and  scientific 
celebrity  gathered  in  the  stalls  of  the  St.  James's  Theatre 
as  perhaps  were  never  seen  in  a  London  playhouse  before 
or  since.  Henry  James  was  positively  storm-ridden  with 
emotion  before  the  fatal  night,  and  full  of  fantastic  plans.  I 
recall  that  one  was  that  he  should  hide  in  the  bar  of  a  little 
public-house  down  an  alley  close  to  the  theatre,  whither  I 
should  slip  forth  at  the  end  of  the  second  act  and  report 
"how  it  was  going."  This  was  not  carried  out,  and  for- 
tunately Henry  James  resisted  the  temptation  of  being 
present  in  the  theatre  during  the  performance.     All  seemed 

33 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

If)  1)0  ^oinj:j  fairly  well  until  the  close,  when  Henry  James 
appeared  and  was  called  before  the  curtain — only  to  be 
subjected — to  our  unspeakable  horror  and  shame— to  a 
storm  of  hoots  and  jeers  and  catcalls  from  the  gallery, 
answered  by  loud  and  sustained  applause  from  the  stalls, 
the  whole  producinj^:  an  effect  of  hell  broke  loose,  in  the 
midst  of  whicii  the  author,  as  white  as  chalk,  bowed  and 
spread  forth  deprecating  hands  and  finally  vanished.  It 
was  said  at  the  time,  and  confirmed  later,  that  this 
horrible  performance  was  not  intended  to  humiliate  Henry 
James,  but  was  the  result  of  a  cabal  against  George 
Alexander. 

Early  next  morning  I  called  at  34  De  Vere  Gardens, 
hardly  daring  to  press  the  bell  for  fear  of  the  worst  of 
news,  so  shattered  with  excitement  had  the  playwright 
been  on  the  previous  evening.  I  was  astonished  to  find 
him  perfectly  calm ;  he  had  slept  well  and  was  breakfasting 
with  appetite.  The  theatrical  bubble  in  which  he  had 
lived  a  tormented  existence  for  five  years  was  wholly  and 
finally  broken,  and  he  returned,  even  in  that  earliest  con- 
versation, to  the  discussion  of  the  work  which  he  had  so 
long  and  so  sadly  neglected,  the  art  of  direct  prose  narra- 
tive. And  now  a  remarkable  thing  happened.  The  dis- 
cipline of  toiling  for  the  caprices  of  the  theatre  had 
amounted,  for  so  redundant  an  imaginative  writer,  to  the 
putting  on  of  a  mental  strait-jacket.  He  saw  now  that  he 
need  stoop  no  longer  to  what  he  called  "a  meek  and  lowly 
review  of  the  right  ways  to  keep  on  the  right  side  of  a  body 
of  people  who  have  paid  money  to  be  amused  at  a  particular 
hour  and  place."  Henry  James  was  not  released  from 
this  system  of  vigorous  renunciation  without  a  very 
singular  result.  To  write  for  the  theatre  the  qualities  of 
brevity  and  directness,  of  an  elaborate  plainness,  had  been 
perceived  by  him  to  be  absolutely  necessary,  and  he  had 
tried  to  cultivate  them  with  dogged  patience  for  five  years. 
But  when  he  broke  with  the  theatre,  the  rebound  was  ex- 
cessive. I  recall  his  saying  to  me,  after  the  fiasco  of 
Guy  Domvile,  "At  all  events,  I  have  escaped  for  ever 
from  the  foul  fiend  Excision  !  "       He  vibrated  with  the 

34 


Henry  James 

sense  of  release,  and  he  began  to  enjoy,  physically  and 
intellectually,  a  freedom  which  had  hitherto  been  foreign 
to  his  nature. 

II 

The  abrupt  change  in  Henry  James's  outlook  on  life, 
which  was  the  result  of  his  violent  disillusion  with  regard 
to  theatrical  hopes  and  ambitions,  took  the  form  of  a  dis- 
taste for  London  and  a  determination,  vague  enough  at 
first,  to  breathe  for  the  future  in  a  home  of  his  own  by  the 
sea.  He  thought  of  Bournemouth,  more  definitely  of 
Torquay,  but  finally  his  fate  was  sealed  by  his  being 
offered,  for  the  early  summer  months  of  1896,  a  small 
house  on  the  cliff  at  Point  Hill,  Playden,  whence  he  could 
look  down,  as  from  an  "eagle's  nest,"  on  the  exquisite 
little  red-roofed  town  of  Rye  and  over  the  wide  floor  of 
the  marsh  of  Sussex.  When  the  time  came  for  his  being 
turned  out  of  this  retreat,  he  positively  could  not  face  the 
problem  of  returning  to  the  breathless  heat  of  London  in 
August,  and  he  secured  the  Vicarage  in  the  heart  of  Rye 
itself  for  two  months  more.  Here,  as  earlier  at  Point  Hill, 
I  was  his  guest,  and  it  was  wonderful  to  observe  how  his 
whole  moral  and  intellectual  nature  seemed  to  burgeon 
and  expand  in  the  new  and  delicious  liberty  of  country 
life.  We  were  incessantly  in  the  open  air,  on  the  terrace 
(for  the  Vicarage,  though  musty  and  dim,  possessed,  like 
the  fresher  Point  Hill,  a  sea-looking  terrace),  sauntering 
round  the  little  town,  or  roving  for  miles  and  miles  over 
the  illimitable  flats,  to  Winchelsea,  to  Lydd,  to  the  recesses 
of  Walland  Marsh — even,  on  one  peerless  occasion,  so  far 
afield  as  to  Midley  Chapel  and  the  Romneys. 

Never  had  I  known  Henry  James  so  radiant,  so  cheerful 
or  so  self-assured.  During  the  earlier  London  years  there 
had  hung  over  him  a  sort  of  canopy,  a  mixture  of  reserve 
and  deprecation,  faintly  darkening  the  fullness  of  com- 
munion with  his  character;  there  always  had  seemed  to 
be  something  indefinably  non-conductive  between  him  and 
those  in  whom  he  had  most  confidence.  While  the  play- 
writing   fit  was  on   him   this  had  deepened  almost   into 

35 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

frotftilncss;  the  complete  freedom  of  intercourse  which  is 
tlie  charm  of  friendship  had  been  made  more  and  more 
difficult  by  an  excess  of  sensibility.  Henry  James  had 
become  almost  what  the  French  call  a  buisson  d'dpines. 
It  was  therefore  surprising  and  highly  delightful  to  find 
that  this  cloud  had  ceased  to  brood  over  him,  and  had 
floated  away,  leaving  behind  it  a  laughing  azure  in  which 
quite  a  new  and  charming  Henry  James  stood  revealed. 
The  summer  of  1896,  when  by  a  succession  of  happy 
chances  I  was  much  alone  with  him  at  Rye,  rests  in  my 
recollection  as  made  exquisite  by  his  serene  and  even  play- 
ful uniformity  of  temper,  by  the  removal  of  everything 
which  had  made  intercourse  occasionally  difficult,  and  by 
the  addition  of  forms  of  amenity  that  had  scarcely  been 
foreshadowed.  On  reflection,  however,  I  find  that  I  am 
mixing  up  memories  of  June  at  Point  Hill  and  of 
September  at  the  Vicarage  with  the  final  Rye  adventure, 
which  must  now  be  chronicled.  When  he  was  obliged 
to  turn  out  of  his  second  refuge,  he  returned  to  London, 
but  with  an  ever-deepening  nostalgia  for  the  little  Sussex 
town  where  he  had  been  happy.  In  the  following  summer 
the  voice  of  Venice  called  him  so  loudly  that  he  stayed 
in  London  longer  than  usual,  meaning  to  spend  the 
autumn  and  winter  in  Italy.  He  thought  meanwhile  of 
Bournemouth  and  of  Saxmundham.  He  went  on  his 
bicycle  round  the  desolate  ghost  of  Dunwich,  but  his 
heart  was  whispering  "Rye"  to  him  all  the  while. 
Nothing  then  seemed  available,  however,  when  suddenly 
the  unexpected  vacancy  of  the  most  eligible  residence  con- 
ceivable settled,  in  the  course  of  a  couple  of  days,  the 
whole  future  earthly  pilgrimage  of  Henry  James.  The 
huge  fact  was  immediately  announced  in  a  letter  of 
September  25th,  1897  : 

I  am  just  drawing  a  long  breath  from  having  signed — a  few 
moments  since — a  most  i>ortentous  parchment  :  the  lease  of  a 
sn-.allish,  charming,  cheap  old  house  in  the  country — down  at 
Rye — for  21  years.  (It  was  built  about  1705.)  It  is  exactly 
what  I  want  and  secretly  and  hopelessly  coveted  (since  knowing 

36 


Henry  James 

at)  without  dreaming-  it  would  ever  fall.  But  it  has  fallen — and 
has  a  beautiful  room  for  you  (the  King's  Room — George  II's 
— who  slept  there) ;  together  with  every  promise  of  yielding  me 
an  indispensable  retreat  from  May  to  October  (every  year). 
I  hope  you  are  not  more  sorry  to  take  up  the  load  of  life  that 
awaits,  these  days,  the  hunch  of  one's  shoulders  than  I  am. 
You'll  ask  me  what  I  mean  by  "life."  Come  down  to  Lamb 
House  and  I'll  tell  you. 


There  were  the  most  delightful  possibilities  in  the 
property,  which  included  a  small  garden  and  lawn,  the 
whole  hemmed  in  by  a  peaceful  old  red  wall,  plentifully 
tapestried  with  espaliers.  The  noble  tower  of  Rye  church 
looked  down  into  it,  and  Henry  James  felt  that  the  chimes 
sounded  sweetly  to  him  as  he  faced  his  garden  in  monastic 
quiet,  the  little  market-town  packed  tightly  about  him,  yet 
wholly  out  of  sight. 

Meanwhile  the  intellectual  release  had  been  none  the 
less  marked  than  the  physical.  The  earliest  result  of  his 
final  escape  from  the  lures  of  the  Vivian  of  the  stage  had 
been  the  composition  of  a  novel,  The  Spoils  of  Poynton, 
in  a  manner  entirely  different  from  that  of  his  earlier  long 
romances.  This  was  published  in  1897,  ^^d  in  the  mean- 
time he  had  set  to  work  on  a  longer  and  more  ambitious 
romance,  What  Maisie  Knew.  In  these  he  began  the 
exercise  of  what  has  been  called  his  "later  manner,"  which 
it  would  be  out  of  proportion  to  attempt  to  define  in  a  study 
which  purports  to  be  biographical  rather  than  critical.  It 
is  enough  to  remind  the  reader  familiar  with  Henry  James's 
writings  that  in  abandoning  the  more  popular  and  conven- 
tional method  of  composition  he  aimed  at  nothing  less  than 
a  revolution  in  the  art  of  the  novelist.  While  thus  actively 
engaged  in  a  new  scheme  of  life,  he  found  it  more  and 
more  difficult  to  break  "the  spell  of  immobility"  which 
enveloped  him.  He  who  had  been  so  ready  to  start  on 
any  call  of  impulse  in  any  direction  found  it  impossible  to 
bring  himself  to  respond,  at  Christmas,  1897,  to  the  appeal 
of  Madame  Alphonse  Daudet  to  come  over  to  Paris  to  grace 
the  obsequies  of  her  illustrious  husband.  The  friends — 
»  37 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

and  tlie  author  of  Jack  was  the  most  intimate  of  James's 
Parisian  acquaintances — had  not  met  after  1895,  when 
Daudet  had  spent  a  month  in  London  mainly  under  the 
charf^e  of  Henry  James,  since  which  time  the  French 
novelist's  life  had  been  sapped  and  drained  from  him  by 
a  disease  the  symptoms  of  which  were  beginning  to  be 
painfully  manifest  when  he  was  with  us  in  London.  The 
old  French  friends  were  now  disappearing.  Their  places 
in  Henry  James's  aflfection  were  partly  filled  by  Paul 
Bourget  and  by  Maurice  Barr^s,  whose  remarkable  and 
rather  "gruesome"  book,  Les  Ddracines,  now  supplied 
James  with  an  endless  subject  of  talk  and  reflection. 

The  first  novel  actually  completed  at  Lamb  House  was 
The  Awkward  Age,  which  was  ready  for  the  printers  early 
in  1898.  The  ecstasy  with  which  he  settled  down  to  ap- 
preciate his  new  surroundings  is  reflected  in  that  novel, 
where  the  abode  of  Mr.  Longdon  is  neither  more  nor  less 
than  a  picture  of  Lamb  House.  It  was  a  wonderful 
summer  and  autumn,  and,  as  Henry  James  said:  "The 
air  of  the  place  thrilled  all  the  while  with  the  bliss  of 
birds,  the  hum  of  little  lives  unseen,  and  the  flicker  of 
white  butterflies."  The  MS.  of  The  Awkward  Age  was  no 
sooner  finished  than  he  took  up  the  germ  of  an  incident 
dimly  related  to  him  years  before  at  Addington,  by  Arch- 
bishop Benson,  and  wove  it  into  The  Turn  of  the  Screw, 
a  sort  of  moral  (or  immoral)  ghost  story  which  not  a  few 
readers  consider  to  be  the  most  powerful  of  all  his  writings, 
and  which  others  again  peculiarly  detest.  I  admit  myself 
to  be  a  hanger-on  of  the  former  group,  and  I  have  very 
vivid  recollections  of  the  period  when  The  Turn  of  the 
Screw  was  being  composed.  The  author  discussed  it  with 
a  freedom  not  usual  with  him.  I  remember  that  when  he 
had  finished  it  he  said  to  me  one  day  :  "I  had  to  correct 
the  proofs  of  my  ghost  story  last  night,  and  when  I  had 
finished  them  I  was  so  frightened  that  I  was  afraid  to  go 
upstairs  to  bed  !  " 

By  the  close  of  1898  he  had  got  rid  of  the  flat  in  De 
Vere  Gardens,  which  had  become  a  mere  burden  to  him, 
and  had  taken  what  he  called  an  "invaluable  south-looking, 

38 


Henry  James 

Carlton-Gardens-sweeping  bedroom  "  at  the  Reform  Club 
in  Pall  Mall,  which  served  his  brief  and  sudden  pilgrim- 
ages to  town  for  many  seasons.  Lamb  House,  in  the 
course  of  this  year,  became  his  almost  exclusive  residence, 
and  it  is  to  be  noted  that  at  the  same  time  a  remarkable 
change  came  over  the  nature  of  his  correspondence.  He 
had  been  a  meticulous  but  not  very  inspired  letter-writer 
in  early  youth ;  his  capacity  for  epistolary  composition 
and  his  appetite  for  it  had  developed  remarkably  in  the 
middle  years  (1882-1890).  During  the  hectic  period  of  his 
theatrical  ambition  it  had  dwindled  again.  But  when  he 
settled  finally  at  Rye,  spreading  himself  in  luxurious  con- 
tentment within  the  protection  of  his  old  brick  garden-wall, 
the  pink  and  purple  surface  of  which  stood  in  his  fancy 
as  a  sort  of  bodyguard  of  security  passed  down  for  that 
particular  purpose  through  mild  ages  of  restfulness,  as 
soon  as  he  sat,  with  his  household  gods  about  him,  in 
the  almost  cotton-woolly  hush  of  Lamb  House,  he  began 
to  blossom  out  into  a  correspondent  of  a  new  and  splendid 
class.  The  finest  and  most  characteristic  letters  of  Henry 
James  start  with  his  fifty-fifth  year,  and  they  continue  to 
expand  in  volume,  in  richness  and  in  self-revelation  almost 
to  the  close  of  his  life.  On  this  subject  Mr.  Percy  Lub- 
bock, than  whom  no  one  has  known  better  the  idiosyn- 
crasies of  Henry  James,  has  described  his  method  of 
correspondence  in  a  passage  which  could  not  be  bettered  : 

The  rich  apologies  for  silence  and  backwardness  that 
preface  so  many  of  his  letters  must  be  interpreted  in  the  light, 
partly  indeed  of  his  natural  luxuriance  of  phraseology,  but 
much  more  of  his  generous  conception  of  the  humblest  corre- 
spondent's claim  on  him  for  response.  He  could  not  answer  a 
brief  note  of  friendliness  but  with  pages  of  abounding  elo- 
quence. He  never  dealt  in  the  mere  small  change  of 
intercourse ;  the  postcard  and  the  half-sheet  did  not  exist  for 
him  ;  a  few  lines  of  enquiry  would  bring  from  him  a  bulging 
packet  of  manuscript,  overwhelming  in  its  disproportion.  No 
wonder  that  with  this  standard  of  the  meaning  of  a  letter  he 
often  groaned  under  his  postal  burden.  He  discharged  himself 
of  it,  in  general,  very  late  at  night;  the  morning's  work  left 

39 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

him  too  much  exhausted  for  more  composition  until  then.  At 
midnigfht  he  woaiW  sit  down  to  his  letter-writing  and  cover 
sheet  after  sheet,  sometimes  for  hours,  with  his  dashing"  and 
no't  very  readable  script.  Occasionally  he  would  give  up  a 
day  to  the  working  off  of  arrears  by  dictation,  seldom  omitting 
to  excuse  himself  to  each  correspondent  in  turn  for  the  infliction 
of  the  "fierce  legibility  "  of  type. 


This  amplitude  of  correspondence  was  the  outcome  of 
an  affectionate  solicitude  for  his  friends,  which  led  him  in 
another  direction,  namely,  in  that  of  exercising  a  hos- 
pitality towards  them  for  which  he  had  never  found  an 
opportunity  before.  He  did  not,  however,  choose  to 
collect  anything  which  might  remotely  be  called  "a 
party  " ;  what  he  really  preferred  was  the  presence  of  a 
single  friend  at  a  time,  of  a  companion  who  would  look 
after  himself  in  the  morning,  and  be  prepared  for  a  stroll 
with  his  host  in  the  afternoon,  and  for  a  banquet  of 
untrammelled  conversation  under  the  lamp  or  on  the 
expanse  of  the  lawn  after  the  comfortable  descent  of 
nightfall. 

His  practice  in  regard  to  such  a  visitor  was  always  to 
descend  to  the  railway  station  below  the  town  to  welcome 
the  guest,  who  would  instantly  recognize  his  remarkable 
figure  hurrying  along  the  platform.  Under  the  large  soft 
hat  would  be  visible  the  large  pale  face,  anxiously  scan- 
ning the  carriage-windows  and  breaking  into  smiles  of 
sunshine  when  the  new-comer  was  discovered.  Welcome 
was  signified  by  both  hands  waved  aloft,  lifting  the  skirts 
of  the  customary  cloak,  like  wings.  Then,  luggage  at- 
tended to,  and  the  arm  of  the  guest  securely  seized,  as 
though  even  now  there  might  be  an  attempt  at  escape,  a 
slow  ascent  on  foot  would  begin  up  the  steep  streets,  the 
last  and  steepest  of  all  leading  to  a  discreet  door  which 
admitted  directly  to  the  broad  hall  of  Lamb  House.  Within 
were,  to  right  and  left,  the  pleasant  old  rooms,  with  low 
windows  opening  straight  into  the  garden,  which  was  so 
sheltered  and  economized  as  to  seem  actually  spacious. 
Further  to  the  left  was  a  lofty  detached  room,  full  of  books 

40 


Henry  James 

and  lights,  where  in  summer  Henry  James  usually  wrote, 
secluded  from  all  possible  disturbance.  The  ascent  of 
arrival  from  the  railway  grew  to  be  more  and  more  interest- 
ing as  time  went  on,  and  as  the  novelist  became  more  and 
more  a  familiar  and  respected  citizen,  it  was  much  inter- 
rupted at  last  by  bows  from  ladies  and  salaams  from  shop- 
keepers; many  little  boys  and  girls,  the  latter  having  often 
curtsied,  had  to  be  greeted  and  sometimes  patted  on  the 
head.  These  social  movements  used  to  inspire  in  me  the 
inquiry  :  "Well,  how  soon  are  you  to  be  the  Mayor-Elect 
of  Rye  ?  "  a  pleasantry  which  was  always  well  received. 
So  obviously  did  Henry  James,  in  the  process  of  years, 
become  the  leading  inhabitant  that  it  grew  to  seem  no  im- 
possibility. Stranger  things  had  happened !  No  civic 
authority  would  have  been  more  conscientious  and  few  less 
efficient. 

His  outward  appearance  developed  in  accordance  with 
his  moral  and  intellectual  expansion.  I  have  said  that  in 
early  life  Henry  James  was  not  "impressive";  as  time 
went  on  his  appearance  became,  on  the  contrary,  exces- 
sively noticeable  and  arresting.  He  removed  the  beard 
which  had  long  disguised  his  face,  and  so  revealed  the 
strong  lines  of  mouth  and  chin,  which  responded  to  the 
majesty  of  the  skull.  In  the  breadth  and  smoothness  of 
the  head — Henry  James  became  almost  wholly  bald  early 
in  life — there  was  at  length  something  sacerdotal.  As 
time  went  on,  he  grew  less  and  less  Anglo-Saxon  in 
appearance  and  more  Latin.  I  remember  once  seeing  a 
Canon  preaching  in  the  Cathedral  of  Toulouse  who  was 
the  picture  of  Henry  James  in  his  unction,  his  gravity,  and 
his  vehemence.  Sometimes  there  could  be  noted — what 
Henry  would  have  hated  to  think  existing — a  theatrical 
look  which  struck  the  eye,  as  though  he  might  be  some 
retired  jeune  premier  of  the  Fran9ais,  jeune  no  longer; 
and  often  the  prelatical  expression  faded  into  a  fleeting 
likeness  to  one  or  other  celebrated  Frenchman  of  letters 
(never  to  any  Englishman  or  American),  somewhat  of 
Lacordaire  in  the  intolerable  scrutiny  of  the  eyes,  some- 
what of  Sainte-Beuve,  too,  in  all  except  the  mouth,  which, 

41 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

though  mobile  and  elastic,  gave  the  impression  in  rest  of 
being  small.  All  these  comparisons  and  suggestions, 
however,  must  be  taken  as  the  barest  hints,  intended  to 
mark  the  tendency  of  Henry  James's  radically  powerful 
and  unique  outer  appearance.  The  beautiful  modelling  of 
the  brows,  waxing  and  waning  under  the  stress  of  excite- 
ment, is  a  point  which  singularly  dwells  in  the  memory. 

It  is  very  difficult  to  give  an  impression  of  his  manner, 
which  was  complex  in  the  extreme,  now  restrained  with  a 
deep  reserve,  now  suddenly  expanding,  so  as  to  leave  the 
auditor  breathless,  into  a  flood  of  exuberance.  He  had 
the  habit  of  keeping  his  friends  apart  from  one  another; 
his  intimacies  were  contained  in  many  watertight  com- 
partments. He  disliked  to  think  that  he  was  the  subject 
of  an  interchange  of  impressions,  and  though  he  who 
discussed  everybody  and  everything  with  the  most  pene- 
trating and  analysing  curiosity  must  have  known  perfectly 
well  that  he  also,  in  his  turn,  was  the  theme  of  endless 
discussion,  he  liked  to  ignore  it  and  to  feign  to  be  a 
bodiless  spectator.  Accordingly,  he  was  not  apt  to  pay 
for  the  revelations,  confidences,  guesses  and  what  not 
which  he  so  eagerly  demanded  and  enjoyed  by  any  coin 
of  a  similar  species.  He  begged  the  human  race  to  plunge 
into  experiences,  but  he  proposed  to  take  no  plunge 
himself,  or  at  least  to  have  no  audience  when  he  plunged. 

So  discreet  was  he,  and  so  like  a  fountain  sealed,  that 
many  of  those  who  were  well  acquainted  with  him  have 
supposed  that  he  was  mainly  a  creature  of  observation  and 
fancy,  and  that  life  stirred  his  intellect  while  leaving  his 
senses  untouched.  But  every  now  and  then  he  disclosed 
to  a  friend,  or  rather  admitted  such  a  friend  to  a  flash 
or  glimpse  of  deeper  things.  The  glimpse  was  never  pro- 
longed or  illuminated,  it  was  like  peering  down  for  a 
moment  through  some  chasm  in  the  rocks  dimmed  by  the 
vapour  of  a  clash  of  waves.  One  such  flash  will  always 
leave  my  memory  dazzled.  I  was  staying  alone  with 
Henry  James  at  Rye  one  summer,  and  as  twilight  deepened 
we  walked  together  in  the  garden.  I  forget  by  what 
meanders  we  approached  the  subject,  but  I  suddenly  found 

42 


Henry  James 

that  in  profuse  and  enigmatic  language  he  was  recounting 
to  me  an  experience,  something  that  had  happened,  not 
something  repeated  or  imagined.  He  spoke  of  standing 
on  the  pavement  of  a  city,  in  the  dusk,  and  of  gazing 
upwards  across  the  misty  street,  watching,  watching  for 
the  lighting  of  a  lamp  in  a  window  on  the  third  storey. 
And  the  lamp  blazed  out,  and  through  bursting  tears  he 
strained  to  see  what  was  behind  it,  the  unapproachable 
face.  And  for  hours  he  stood  there,  wet  with  the  rain, 
brushed  by  the  phantom  hurrying  figures  of  the  scene,  and 
never  from  behind  the  lamp  was  for  one  moment  visible 
the  face.  The  mysterious  and  poignant  revelation  closed, 
and  one  could  make  no  comment,  ask  no  question,  being 
throttled  oneself  by  an  overpowering  emotion.  And  for 
a  long  time  Henry  James  shuffled  beside  me  in  the  dark- 
ness, shaking  the  dew  off  the  laurels,  and  still  there  was 
no  sound  at  all  in  the  garden  but  what  our  heels  made 
crunching  the  gravel,  nor  was  the  silence  broken  when 
suddenly  we  entered  the  house  and  he  disappeared  for  an 
hour. 

But  the  gossamer  thread  of  narrative  must  be  picked 
up  once  more,  slight  as  it  is.  Into  so  cloistered  a  life  the 
news  of  the  sudden  loss  of  Edward  Burne-Jones  in  June, 
[898,  fell  with  a  sensation;  he  had  "seen  the  dear  man, 
to  my  great  joy,  only  a  few  hours  before  his  death."  In 
the  early  spring  of  the  next  year  Henry  James  actually 
summoned  resolution  to  go  abroad  again,  visiting  at 
Hy^res  Paul  Bourget  and  the  Vicomte  Melchior  de  Vogiie 
(of  whose  Le  Roman  Russe  and  other  essays  he  was  a 
sturdy  admirer),  and  proceeding  to  Rome,  whence  he  was 
"whirled  by  irresistible  Marion  Crawford  off  to  Sorrento, 
Capri,  Naples,"  some  of  these  now  seen  for  the  first  time. 
He  came  back  to  England  and  to  Lamb  House  at  the  end 
of  June,  to  find  that  his  novel  of  The  Awkward  Age,  which 
was  just  published,  was  being  received  with  a  little  more 
intelligence  and  sympathetic  comprehension  than  had  been 
the  habit  of  greeting  his  productions,  what  he  haughtily, 
but  quite  justly,  called  "the  lurid  asininity  "  of  the  Press 
in  his  regard  now  beginning  to  be  sensibly  affected  by 

43 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

the  loyalty  of  the  little  clan  of  those  who  saw  what  he  was 
"driving  at  "  in  the  new  romances,  and  who  valued  it  as  a 
pearl  of  price.  Nevertheless,  there  was  still  enough  thick- 
witted  denunciation  of  his  novels  to  fill  his  own  "clan  " 
with  anger,  while  some  even  of  those  who  loved  him  best 
admitted  themselves  bewildered  by  The  Awkward  Age. 
Nothing  is  more  steadily  cleared  away  by  time  than  the 
impression  of  obscurity  that  hangs  over  a  really  fine  work 
of  imagination  when  it  is  new.  Twenty  years  have  now 
passed,  and  no  candid  reader  any  longer  pretends  to  find 
this  admirable  story  "bewildering." 

The  passing  of  old  friends  was  partly  healed  by  the 
coming  of  new  friends,  and  it  was  about  this  time  that 
Mr.  H.  G.  Wells,  Mr.  Rudyard  Kipling,  and  Mr.  W.  E. 
Norris  began  to  be  visited  and  corresponded  wi:h.  In 
1900  and  1901  Henry  James  was  slowly  engaged,  with 
luxurious  throes  of  prolonged  composition,  in  dictating 
The  Ambassadors,  which  he  "tackled  and,  for  various 
reasons,  laid  aside,"  only  to  attack  it  again  "with  intensity 
and  on  the  basis  of  a  simplification  that  made  it  easier"  until 
he  brought  it  successfully  through  its  voluminous  career. 
In  the  summer  of  1902  Mrs.  Wharton,  who  had  dedicated 
to  him,  as  a  stranger,  her  novel  of  The  Valley  of  Decision, 
became  a  personal  acquaintance,  and  soon,  and  till  the 
end,  one  of  the  most  valued  and  intimate  of  his  friends. 
This  event  synchronized  with  the  publication  of  his  own 
great  book.  The  Wings  of  a  Dove.  It  was  followed  by 
The  Golden  Bowl.  He  now  turned  from  such  huge 
schemes  as  this — which  in  his  fatigue  he  described  as  "too 
inordinately  drawn  out  and  too  inordinately  rubbed  in  " 
— to  the  composition  of  short  stories,  in  which  he  found 
both  rest  and  refreshment. 

On  this  subject,  the  capabilities  of  the  conte  as  a  form  of 
peculiarly  polished  and  finished  literature,  he  regaled  me 
— and  doubtless  other  friends — at  this  time  with  priceless 
observations.  I  recall  a  radiant  August  afternoon  when 
we  sallied  from  his  high  abode  and  descended  to  the  mud 
of  the  winding  waters  of  the  Brede,  where,  on  the  shaky 
bridge  across  the  river,  leaning  perilously  above  the  flood, 

44 


Henry  James 

Henry  James  held  forth  on  the  extraordinary  skill  of  Guy 
de  Maupassant,  whose  posthumous  collection,  Le  Col- 
porteur, had  just  reached  him,  and  on  the  importance  of 
securing,  as  that  inimitable  artist  so  constantly  secured, 
one  straight,  intelligible  action  which  must  be  the  source 
of  all  vitality  in  what,  without  it,  became  a  mere  wandering 
anecdote,  more  or  less  vaguely  ornamented.  Henry  James 
was  at  this  time,  I  think,  himself  engaged  upon  the  series 
of  short  stories  which  ultimately  appeared  under  the  title 
of  The  Better  Sort,  each  one,  as  he  said,  being  the  exhibi- 
tion of  a  case  of  experience  or  conduct.  He  collected  and 
published  in  these  years  several  such  volumes  of  short 
compositions,  in  which  he  endeavoured,  and  admirably 
effected  his  endeavour,  to  combine  neatness  of  handling 
with  that  beauty  of  conception  which  became  more  and 
more  the  object  of  his  passionate  desire.  The  reader 
naturally  recalls  such  perfect  specimens  of  his  craft  as 
The  Real  Right  Thing  and  The  Beast  in  the  Jungle. 

For  many  years  he  had  let  his  fancy  toy  with  the  idea 
of  returning,  on  a  visit  only,  to  America.  In  1904  this 
project  really  took  shape,  and  the  long-debated  journey 
actually  took  place.  He  terminated  another  extended 
romance.  The  Golden  Bowl,  and  in  August  set  sail  for 
New  York,  ostensibly  for  the  purpose  of  writing  a  book  of 
American  impressions.  The  volume  called  The  American 
Scene,  published  in  1906,  gives  his  account  of  the  adven- 
ture, or  rather  of  certain  parts  of  it.  He  lived  through 
the  first  autumn  with  his  family  in  the  mountains  of  New 
Hampshire,  and,  after  a  sojourn  in  Cambridge,  spent 
Christmas  in  New  York.  He  then  went  south  in  search 
of  warmth,  which  he  found  at  last  in  Florida.  By  way 
of  Chicago,  St.  Louis,  and  Indianapolis  he  reached  Cali- 
fornia in  April,  1905.  He  delivered  in  various  American 
Colleges  two  lectures,  specially  written  for  the  purpose, 
which  came  out  as  a  little  volume  in  the  United  States, 
but  have  not  yet  appeared  in  England.  His  impressions 
of  America,  in  the  volume  which  he  published  after  his 
return,  stop  with  Florida,  and  give  therefore  no  record  of 
the  extreme  pleasure  which  he  experienced  in  California, 

45 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

of  vvhicli  his  private  leUcrs  were  full.  He  declared,  writ- 
ing on  April  5th,  1905,  from  Coronado  Beach,  that  "Cali- 
fornia has  completely  bowled  me  over.  .  .  .  The  flowers, 
the  wild  flowers,  just  now  in  particular,  which  fairly  rage 
with  radiance  over  the  land,  are  worthy  of  some  purer 
planet  than  this.  ...  It  breaks  my  heart  to  have  so  stinted 
myself  here  " ;  but  return  eastward  was  imperative,  and 
in  August,  1905,  he  was  back  again  safe  in  the  silence  of 
Lamb  House. 

Throughout  the  following  autumn  and  winter  he  was, 
as  he  said,  "squeezing  out"  his  American  impressions, 
which  did  not  flow  so  easily  as  he  had  hoped  they  would. 
Many  other  enterprises  hung  temptingly  before  him,  and 
distracted  his  thoughts  from  that  particular  occupation. 
Moreover,  just  before  his  plan  for  visiting  the  United 
States  had  taken  shape,  he  had  promised  to  write  for  a 
leading  firm  of  English  publishers  "a  romantical-psycho- 
logical-pictorial-social  "  book  about  London,  and  in 
November,  1905,  he  returned  to  this  project  with  vivacity. 
There  is  a  peculiar  interest  about  works  that  great  writers 
mean  to  compose  and  never  succeed  in  producing,  and 
this  scheme  of  a  great  picturesque  book  about  London  is 
like  a  ghost  among  the  realities  of  Henry  James's  inven- 
tion. He  spoke  about  it  more  often  and  more  freely  than 
he  did  about  his  solid  creations;  I  feel  as  though  I  had 
handled  and  almost  as  though  I  had  read  it.  Westminster 
was  to  have  been  the  core  of  the  matter,  which  was  to  circle 
out  concentrically  to  the  City  and  the  suburbs.  Henry 
James  put  me  under  gratified  contribution  by  coming 
frequently  to  the  House  of  Lords  in  quest  of  "local  colour," 
and  I  took  him  through  the  corridors  and  up  into  garrets 
of  the  Palace  where  never  foreign  foot  had  stepped  before. 
There  was  not,  to  make  a  clean  breast  of  it,  much  "local 
colour  "  to  be  wrung  out,  but  Henry  James  was  indefatig- 
able in  curiosity.  What  really  did  thrill  him  was  to  stand 
looking  down  from  one  of  the  windows  of  the  Library  on 
the  Terrace,  crowded  with  its  motley  afternoon  crew  of 
Members  of  both  Houses  and  their  guests  of  both  sexes. 
He  liked  that  better  than  to  mingle  with  the  throng  itself, 

46 


Henry  James 

and  he  should  have  written  a  superb  page  on  the  scene, 
with  its  background  of  shining  river  and  misty  towers. 
Alas  !  it  will  not  be  read  until  we  know  what  songs  the 
Sirens  sang. 

All  through  the  quiet  autumn  and  winter  of  1906  he 
was  busy  preparing  the  collective  and  definite,  but  far 
from  complete,  edition  of  his  novels  and  tales  which  began 
to  appear  some  twelve  months  later.  This  involved  a 
labour  which  some  of  his  friends  ventured  to  disapprove 
of,  since  it  included  a  re-writing  into  his  latest  style  of 
the  early  stories  which  possessed  a  charm  in  their  un- 
affected immaturity.  Henry  James  was  conscious,  I 
think,  of  the  arguments  which  might  be  brought  against 
this  reckless  revision,  but  he  rejected  them  with  violence. 
I  was  spending  a  day  or  two  with  him  at  Lamb  House 
when  Roderick  Hudson  was  undergoing,  or  rather  had 
just  undergone,  the  terrible  trial ;  so  the  revised  copy, 
darkened  and  swelled  with  MS.  alterations,  was  put  into 
my  hands.  I  thought — I  dare  say  I  was  quite  mistaken 
— that  the  whole  perspective  of  Henry  James's  work,  the 
evidence  of  his  development  and  evolution,  his  historical 
growth,  were  confused  and  belied  by  this  wholesale 
tampering  with  the  original  text.  Accordingly  I  ex- 
claimed against  such  dribbling  of  new  wine  into  the  old 
bottles.  This  was  after  dinner,  as  we  sat  alone  in  the 
garden-room.  All  that  Henry  James — though  I  confess, 
with  a  darkened  countenance — said  at  the  time  was,  "The 
only  alternative  would  have  been  to  put  the  vile  thing" — 
that  is  to  say  the  graceful  tale  of  Roderick  Hudson — 
"behind  the  fire  and  have  done  with  it!  "  Then  we 
passed  to  other  subjects,  and  at  length  we  parted  for  the 
night  in  unruffled  cheerfulness.  But  what  was  my  dis- 
may, on  reaching  the  breakfast-table  next  morning,  to 
see  my  host  sombre  and  taciturn,  with  gloom  thrown 
across  his  frowning  features  like  a  veil.  I  inquired  rather 
anxiously  whether  he  had  slept  well.  "Slept!"  he 
answered  with  dreary  emphasis.  "Was  I  likely  to  sleep 
when  my  brain  was  tortured  with  all  the  cruel  and — to 
put  it  plainly  to  you — monstrous  insinuations  which  you 

47 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

had  brought  forward  against  my  proper,  my  necessary, 
my  absolutely  inevitable  corrections  of  the  disgraceful  and 
disreputable  style  of  Roderick  Hudson?  "  I  withered, 
like  a  guilty  thing  ashamed,  before  the  eyes  that  glared 
at  me  over  the  coffee-pot,  and  I  inly  resolved  that  not  one 
word  of  question  should  ever  escape  my  lips  on  this  subject 
again. 

Early  in  1907  he  was  tempted  once  more,  after  so  long 
absence,  to  revisit  France.  While  in  America  he  had 
acquired  the  habit  of  motoring,  which  he  learned  to  enjoy 
so  much  that  it  became  the  greatest  physical  pleasure  of 
his  life,  and  one  which  seemed  definitely  to  benefit  his 
health.  He  motored  through  a  great  part  of  France,  and 
then  proceeded  to  his  beloved  Italy,  where  he  spent  some 
radiant  summer  days  under  the  pines  near  Vallombrosa, 
and  later  some  more  with  his  lifelong  friend  Mrs.  Curtis 
in  her  wonderful  Palazzo  Barbaro  in  Venice.  Ten  weeks 
in  Paris  must  be  added  to  the  foreign  record  of  this 
year,  almost  the  last  of  those  which  Henry  James  was 
able  to  dedicate  to  the  Latin  world  that  he  loved  so 
well  and  comprehended  so  acutely.  The  "nightmare," 
as  he  called  it,  of  his  Collected  Edition  kept  him  closely 
engaged  for  months  after  his  return — it  ultimately  ran 
into  a  range  of  twenty-four  volumes — but  he  was  also 
sketching  a  novel,  The  Ivory  Tower,  which  was  to  embody 
some  of  his  American  recollections ;  this  was  never 
finished.  He  met  new  friends  of  the  younger  generation, 
such  as  Hugh  Walpole  and  Rupert  Brooke,  and  they  gave 
him  great  happiness. 

He  seemed  to  be  approaching  old  age  in  placidity  and 
satisfaction  when,  towards  the  end  of  1909,  he  was  seized 
by  a  mysterious  group  of  illnesses  which  "deprived  him 
of  all  power  to  work  and  caused  him  immeasurable  suffer- 
ing of  mind."  Unfortunately  his  beloved  brother  William 
was  also  failing  in  health,  and  had  come  to  Europe  in 
the  vain  search  for  recovery;  their  conditions  painfully 
interacted.  The  whole  year  1910  was  one  of  almost  un- 
mitigated distress.  Henry  accompanied  Mr.  and  Mrs. 
William  back  to  their  home  in  New  Hampshire,  where  in 

48 


Henry  James 

the  autumn  not  only  the  eminent  philosopher,  but  a  third 
brother,  Robertson  James,  died,  leaving  Henry  solitary 
indeed,  and  weighed  upon  by  a  cloud  of  melancholy  which 
forbade  him  to  write  or  almost  to  speak.  Out  of  this  he 
passed  in  the  spring  of  191 1,  and  returned  to  Lamb  House, 
where  he  had  another  sharp  attack  of  illness  in  the  autumn 
of  1912.  It  was  now  felt  that  the  long  pale  winters  over 
the  marsh  at  Rye  were  impossible  for  him,  and  the  bed- 
room at  the  Reform  Club  insufficient.  He  therefore  rented 
a  small  flat  high  up  over  the  Thames  in  Cheyne  Walk, 
where  he  was  henceforth  to  spend  half  of  each  year  and 
die.  He  sat,  on  the  occasion  of  his  seventieth  birthday,  to 
Mr.  Sargent  for  the  picture  which  is  now  one  of  the 
treasures  of  the  National  Portrait  Gallery ;  this  was  sur- 
prisingly mutilated,  while  being  exhibited  at  the  Royal 
Academy,  by  a  "militant  suffragette  ";  Henry  James  was 
extraordinarily  exhilarated  by  having  been  thus  "impaired 
by  the  tomahawk  of  the  savage,"  and  displayed  himself 
as  "breasting  a  wondrous  high-tide  of  postal  condolence 
in  this  doubly-damaged  state."  This  was  his  latest  ex- 
citement before  the  war  with  Germany  drowned  every 
other  consideration. 

The  record  of  the  last  months  of  Henry  James's  life 
is  told  in  the  wonderful  letters  that  he  wrote  between  the 
beginning  of  August,  1914,  and  the  close  of  November, 
1915.  He  was  at  Rye  when  the  war  broke  out,  but  he 
found  it  absolutely  impossible  to  stay  there  without  daily 
communication  with  friends  in  person,  and,  contrary  to 
his  lifelong  habit,  he  came  posting  up  to  London  in  the 
midst  of  the  burning  August  weather.  He  was  trans- 
figured by  the  events  of  those  early  weeks,  overpowered, 
and  yet,  in  his  vast  and  generous  excitement,  himself 
overpowering.  He  threw  off  all  the  languor  and  melan- 
choly of  the  recent  years,  and  he  appeared  actually  grown 
in  size  as  he  stalked  the  streets,  amazingly  moved  by  the 
unexpected  nightmare,  "the  huge  horror  of  blackness" 
which  he  saw  before  him.  "The  plunge  of  civilization 
into  the  abyss  of  blood  and  darkness  by  the  wanton  feat 
of   these   two   infamous   autocrats"    made   him    suddenly 

.49 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

realize  that  the  quiet  years  of  prosperity  which  had  pre- 
ceded 1914  had  been  really,  as  he  put  it,  "treacherous," 
and  that  their  perfidy  had  left  us  unprotected  against  the 
tragic  terrors  which  now  faced  our  world.  It  was  astonish- 
ing how  great  Henry  James  suddenly  seemed  to  become; 
he  positively  loomed  above  us  in  his  splendid  and  dis- 
interested faith.  His  first  instinct  had  been  horror  at  the 
prospect;  his  second  anger  and  indignation  against  the 
criminals;  but  to  these  succeeded  a  passion  of  love  and 
sympathy  for  England  and  France,  and  an  unyielding  but 
anxious  and  straining  confidence  in  their  ultimate  success. 
Nothing  could  express  this  belter  than  the  language  of  a 
friend  who  saw  him  constantly  and  studied  his  moods 
with  penetrating  sympathy.     Mr.  Percy  Lubbock  says  : 

To  all  who  listened  to  him  in  those  days  it  must  have 
seemed  that  he  g-ave  us  what  we  lacked — a  voice ;  there  was 
a  trumpet  note  in  it  that  was  heard  nowhere  else  and  that 
alone  rose  to  the  height  of  the  truth. 

The  impression  Henry  James  gave  in  these  first  months 
of  the  war  could  not  be  reproduced  in  better  terms.  To 
be  in  his  company  was  to  be  encouraged,  stimulated  and 
yet  filled  with  a  sense  of  the  almost  intolerable  gravity 
of  the  situation;  it  was  to  be  moved  with  that  "trumpet 
note  "  in  his  voice,  as  the  men  fighting  in  the  dark  defiles 
of  Roncevaux  were  moved  by  the  sound  of  the  oliphant 
of  Roland.  He  drew  a  long  breath  of  relief  in  the  thought 
that  England  had  not  failed  in  her  manifest  duty  to 
France,  nor  "shirked  any  one  of  the  implications  of  the 
Entente."  When,  as  at  the  end  of  the  first  month,  things 
were  far  from  exhilarating  for  the  Allies,  Henry  James 
did  not  give  way  to  despair,  but  he  went  back  to  Rye, 
possessing  his  soul  in  waiting  patience,  "bracing  himself 
unutterably,"  as  he  put  it,  "and  holding  on  somehow 
(though  to  God  knows  what!)  in  presence  of  the  per- 
petrations so  gratuitously  and  infamously  hideous  as  the 
destruction  of  Louvain  and   its  accompaniments." 

At  Lamb  House  he  sat  through  that  gorgeous  tawny 

SO 


Henry  James 

September,  listening  to  the  German  guns  thundering  just 
across  the  Channel,  while  the  advance  of  the  enemy 
through  those  beautiful  lands  which  he  knew  and  loved 
so  well  filled  him  with  anguish.  He  used  to  sally  forth 
and  stand  on  the  bastions  of  his  little  town,  gazing  over 
the  dim  marsh  that  became  sand-dunes,  and  then  sea,  and 
then  a  mirage  of  the  white  cliffs  of  French  Flanders  that 
were  actually  visible  when  the  atmosphere  grew  trans- 
parent. The  anguish  of  his  execration  became  almost  the 
howl  of  some  animal,  of  a  lion  of  the  forest  with  the  arrow 
in  his  flank,  when  the  Germans  wrecked  Reims  Cathedral. 
He  gazed  and  gazed  over  the  sea  south-east,  and 
fancied  that  he  saw  the  flicker  of  the  flames.  He  ate  and 
drank,  he  talked  and  walked  and  thought,  he  slept  and 
waked  and  lived  and  breathed  only  the  War.  His  friends 
grew  anxious,  the  tension  was  beyond  what  his  natural 
powers,  transfigured  as  they  were,  could  be  expected  to 
endure,  and  he  was  persuaded  to  come  back  to  Chelsea, 
although  a  semblance  of  summer  still  made  Rye 
attractive. 

During  this  time  his  attitude  towards  America  was 
marked  by  a  peculiar  delicacy.  His  letters  expressed  no 
upbraiding,  but  a  yearning,  restrained  impatience  that 
took  the  form  of  a  constant  celebration  of  the  attitude  of 
England,  which  he  found  in  those  early  months  con- 
sistently admirable.  In  his  abundant  and  eloquent  letters 
to  America  he  dealt  incessantly  on  the  shining  light  which 
events  were  throwing  on  "England's  moral  position  and 
attitude,  her  predominantly  incurable  good-nature,  the 
sublimity  or  the  egregious  folly,  one  scarcely  knows  which 
to  call  it,  of  her  innocence  in  face  of  the  most  prodigiously 
massed  and  worked-out  intentions  of  aggression."  He 
admitted,  with  every  gesture  of  courtesy,  that  America's 
absence  from  the  feast  of  allied  friendship  on  an  occasion 
so  unexampled,  so  infinitely  momentous,  was  a  bitter 
grief  to  him,  but  he  was  ready  to  believe  it  a  necessity. 
For  his  own  part,  almost  immediately  on  his  return  to 
London  in  October,  1914,  Henry  James  began  to  relieve 
the  mental  high  pressure  by  some  kinds  of  practical  work 

51 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

for  which  nothing  in  his  previous  life  had  fitted  him,  but 
into  which  he  now  threw  himself  with  even  exhausting 
ardour.  He  had  always  shrunk  from  physical  contact 
with  miscellaneous  strangers,  but  now  nothing  seemed 
unwelcome  save  aloofness  which  would  have  divided  him 
from  the  sufferings  of  others.  The  sad  fate  of  Belgium 
particularly  moved  him,  and  he  found  close  to  his  flat  in 
Cheyne  Walk  a  centre  for  the  relief  of  Belgian  refugees, 
and  he  was  active  in  service  there.  A  little  later  on  he 
ardently  espoused  the  work  of  the  American  Volunteer 
Motor  Ambulance  Corps.  His  practical  experiences  and 
his  anxiety  to  take  part  in  the  great  English  movement  for 
relief  of  the  Belgians  and  the  French  are  reflected  in  the 
essays  which  were  collected  in  1919  under  the  title  of 
Within  the  Rim. 

We  were,  however,  made  anxious  by  the  effect  of  all 
this  upon  his  nerves.  The  magnificent  exaltation  of  spirit 
which  made  him  a  trumpeter  in  the  sacred  progress  of  the 
Allies  was  of  a  nature  to  alarm  us  as  much  as  it  inspirited 
and  rejoiced  us.  When  we  thought  of  what  he  had  been 
in  191 1,  how  sadly  he  had  aged  in  1912,  it  was  not 
credible  that  in  1915  he  could  endure  to  be  filled  to  over- 
flowing by  this  tide  of  febrile  enthusiasm.  Some  of  us, 
in  the  hope  of  diverting  his  thoughts  a  little  from  the 
obsession  of  the  war,  urged  him  to  return  to  his  proper 
work ;  and  he  responded  in  part  to  our  observations,  while 
not  abandoning  his  charitable  service.  He  was  at  work 
on  The  Ivory  Tower  when  the  war  began,  but  he  could 
not  recover  the  note  of  placidity  which  it  demanded,  and 
he  abandoned  it  in  favour  of  a  novel  begun  in  1900  and 
then  laid  aside.  The  Sense  of  the  Past.  He  continued, 
at  the  same  time,  his  reminiscences,  and  was  writing  the 
fragment  published  since  his  death  as  The  Middle  Years. 
But  all  this  work  was  forced  from  him  with  an  effort,  very 
slowly ;  the  old  sprightly  running  of  composition  was  at  an 
end,  the  fact  being  that  his  thoughts  were  now  incessantly 
distracted  by  considerations  of  a  far  more  serious  order. 

The  hesitations  of  Mr.  W^ilson,  and  Henry  James's 
conviction  that  in  the  spring  of  1915  the  United  States 

52 


Henry  James 

government  was  "sitting  down  in  meekness  and  silence 
under  the  German  repudiation  of  every  engagement  she 
solemnly  took  with  "  America,  led  to  his  taking  a  step 
which  he  felt  to  be  in  many  respects  painful,  but  abso- 
lutely inevitable.  His  heart  was  so  passionately  united 
with  England  in  her  colossal  effort,  and  he  was  so  dismally 
discouraged  by  the  unending  hesitation  of  America,  that 
he  determined  to  do  what  he  had  always  strenuously 
refused  to  do  before,  namely,  apply  for  British  naturaliza- 
tion. Mr.  Asquith  (then  Prime  Minister),  Sir  George 
Prothero  (the  Editor  of  the  Quarterly  Review),  and  I  had 
the  honour  and  the  gratification  of  being  chosen  his 
sponsors.  In  the  case  of  so  illustrious  a  claimant  the 
usual  formalities  were  passed  over,  and  on  July  26th,  191 5, 
Henry  James  became  a  British  subject.  Unhappily  he 
did  not  live  to  see  America  join  the  Allies,  and  so  missed 
the  joy  for  which  he  longed  above  all  others. 

But  his  radiant  enthusiasm  was  burning  him  out.  In 
August  he  had  a  slight  breakdown,  and  his  autumn  was 
made  miserable  by  an  affection  of  the  heart.  He  felt,  he 
said,  twenty  years  older,  but  "still,  I  cultivate,  I  at  least 
attempt,  a  brazen  front."  He  still  got  about,  and  I  saw 
him  at  Westminster  on  the  evening  of  November  29th. 
This  was,  I  believe,  the  last  time  he  went  out,  and  two 
days  later,  on  the  night  between  the  ist  and  the  2nd  of 
December,  he  had  a  stroke.  He  partly  rallied  and  was 
able  to  receive  comfort  from  the  presence  of  his  sister-in- 
law,  Mrs.  William  James,  who  hurried  across  the  Atlantic 
to  nurse  him.  At  the  New  Year  he  was  awarded  the 
highest  honour  which  the  King  can  confer  on  a  British 
man  of  letters,  the  Order  of  Merit,  the  insignia  of  which 
were  brought  to  his  bedside  by  Lord  Bryce.  On 
February  28th,  1916,  he  died,  within  two  months  of  his 
73rd  birthday.  His  body  was  cremated,  and  the  funeral 
service  held  at  that  "altar  of  the  dead  "  which  he  had  loved 
so  much,  Chelsea  Old  Church,  a  few  yards  from  his  own 
door. 

1920. 

E  53 


SAMUEL    BUTLER 

LET  it  be  said  at  once  that  Mr.  Henry  Festing  Jones's 
Life  of  Samuel  Butler  tells  the  history  of  a  very 
remarkable  man  with  a  vividness  which  leaves 
nothing  to  be  desired.  This  is  not  a  vain  compliment; 
it  is  a  tribute  which  common  justice  demands  on  an 
unusual  occasion.  There  were  ninety-nine  chances  in  a 
hundred  that  Butler's  life  would  never  be  adequately,  or 
even  intelligently,  recorded.  Nature  and  circumstance 
had  done  their  best  to  make  him  obscure  and  incompre- 
hensible. The  situation  has  been  saved  by  two  facts: 
the  first,  that  Butler  was  excessively  interested  in  himsel|; 
the  second,  that  Mr.  Jones  was  always — not  merely  since 
Butler's  death,  but  always — excessively  interested  in 
Butler.  These  are  not  conditions  which  are  essential  to 
the  success  of  biography  in  every  case,  especially  when 
the  general  unanimity  of  admiration  has  made  all  the 
contemporaries  of  a  great  man  in  some  sort  his  bio- 
graphers, but  they  are  absolutely  required  to  preserve  for 
us  the  features  of  an  eccentric  and  isolated  person  who 
failed  almost  all  through  his  life  to  attract  admiration,  and 
who  laid  himself  out  to  be  completely  misunderstood  when 
the  tide  should  at  last  turn  in  his  favour.  We  are  pre- 
served from  such  a  loss  by  the  meticulous  attention  which 
Samuel  Butler  paid  to  himself,  and  by  the  infatuated  zeal 
with  which  Mr.  Jones  adopted,  continued,  and  developed 
that  attention.  Butler  lives  twice  over,  or  rather  has  never 
ceased  to  live,  in  the  mind  and  humour  of  Mr.  Henry 
Festing  Jones. 

We  move  in  an  age  which  prides  itself  more  and  more 
on  being  able  to  see  the  mote  in  the  eye  of  its  immediate 
predecessor.    But  Samuel  Butler  was  the  precursor  of  this 

55 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

rebellion,  and  is  historically  notable  as  the  earliest  anti- 
Victorian.  He  was  born  at  a  moment  which  was  to  prove 
less  rich  than  almost  any  other  of  the  remarkable  nine- 
teenth century,  in  producing  men  who  were  to  be  eminent 
for  intellectual  talent.  It  almost  looks  as  though  Nature, 
which  had  been  so  profuse,  and  was  presently  to  become 
so  liberal  again,  paused  for  a  few  years,  while  she  prepared 
to  let  the  Victorian  Age  proper  wear  itself  out.  The 
immediate  contemporaries  of  Butler  were  Shorthouse, 
whose  John  Inglesant  started  a  new  sentimentality,  and 
William  Morris,  who  combined  a  fresh  aspect  of  romance 
with  an  investigation  of  the  bases  of  society  which  was 
essentially  revolutionary;  with  these  were  T.  H.  Green, 
who  introduced  a  new  Hegelian  spirit  into  philosophical 
speculation,  and  John  Richard  Green,  who  re-examined 
the  foundations  of  our  history.  But  none  of  these  men 
displayed  any  real  parallelism  with  Butler,  by  whose  work 
they  were  none  of  them  at  any  time  affected,  and  of  whom 
perhaps  none  of  them  ever  heard.  The  only  other  name 
which  can  be  quoted  in  this  connexion  is  that  of  Lecky, 
who  may  indeed  be  regarded  as  the  exact  opposite  of 
Butler  in  almost  every  respect — successful  from  earliest 
youth,  at  peace  with  the  world,  reverently  acceptive  of 
every  Victorian  formula,  and  blandly  unconscious  that 
everything  was  not  permanently  for  the  best  in  the  best 
of  all  possible  worlds. 

Butler  is  a  curious  example  of  a  man  of  something  very 
like  genius,  who  passed  through  a  long  life  in  the  midst  of 
intelligent  fellow-men,  not  rebuffing  their  attentions,  but 
encouraging  them ;  not  escaping  by  a  mordid  modesty 
from  criticism,  but  doing  everything  in  his  power  to 
exasperate  it ;  and  yet  failing  to  be  observed.  The  strange 
thing  about  his  case  is  that  he  lived,  mostly  in  London, 
for  sixty-six  years,  and  that  until  nearly  the  close  of  that 
time  scarcely  anyone  felt  more  than  the  most  tepid  and 
casual  curiosity  about  him.  The  only  similar  case  that 
occurs  to  the  memory  in  the  history  of  nineteenth-century 
literature  is  Borrow,  who  in  like  manner,  but  not  with  a 
like  desolating  completeness,  simply  was  unable  to  catch 

56 


Samuel  Butler 

the  eye  of  criticism.  When  each  of  these  writers  died,  it 
seemed  impossible  that  either  of  them  would  ever  occupy- 
half  a  page  in  any  history  of  literature.  It  now  seems 
equally  difficult  to  suppose  that  any  such  history,  if  pos- 
sessing the  least  pretension  to  completeness,  will  in  future 
omit  either  of  them.  This  is  quite  apart  from  any  question 
which  may  present  itself  as  to  the  probability  of  a  decline 
in  the  present  "fashion"  for  them  both.  It  merely  ex- 
presses the  fact  that  while  Borrow  and  Butler  alike  walked 
all  through  their  lives  invisible,  for  the  rest  of  time  they 
must  both  be  patent,  whether  liked  or  disliked. 

Borrow  affected  a  certain  disdain  for  the  laudation 
which  would  not  come  his  way,  and  in  later  life  seemed 
to  have  relinquished  any  desire  to  move  in  the  mouths 
of  men.  But  Butler  never  ceased  to  long  for  fame,  and 
probably  to  expect  it.  Towards  the  close  of  his  life,  when- 
ever he  was  asked  what  new  work  might  be  expected  from 
his  ingenious  pen,  he  used  to  look  demure  and  answer, 
"I  am  editing  my  remains;  I  wish  '  to  leave  everything 
in  order  for  my  executors.'  "  This  w'as  looked  upon  as 
a  joke,  but  it  turns  out  to  have  been  strictly  true.  No 
one  ever  laboured  more  to  appear  at  his  best — in  strict 
accordance  with  truth,  but  still,  at  his  best — to  the  world 
after  his  decease.  His  assiduities  were  like  those  of  the 
dying  Narcissa — 

And  Betty,  give  those  cheeks  a  little  red, 

One  wouldn't,    sure,   look  horrid  when  one's  dead  ! 

He  recovered  as  many  of  his  own  letters  as  he  could  and 
annotated  them;  he  arranged  the  letters  of  his  friends;  he 
copied,  edited,  indexed,  and  dated  all  this  mass  of  corres- 
pondence, and  he  prepared  those  "  Notes  "  which  have 
since  his  death  provided  his  admirers  with  their 
choicest  repast.  In  doing  all  this  he  displayed  an  equal 
naivete  and  enthusiasm.  Mr.  Festing  Jones,  to  whom  all 
this  industry  has  of  course  been  invaluable,  puts  the  matter 
in  a  nutshell  when  he  says  that  Butler  "was  not  contem- 
plating   publication,    but    neither    was    he    contemplating 

57 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

oblivion."     He  was  simply  putting  the  rouge-pot  within 
Betty's  reach. 

Mere  is  Butler's  own  account  of  the  matter,  and  it 
throws  a  strong  light  upon  his  character  : 

People  sometimes  give  me  to  understand  that  it  is  a  piece 
of  ridiculous  conceit  on  my  part  to  jot  down  so  many  notes 
about  myself,  since  it  implies  a  confidence  that  I  shall  one 
day  be  regarded  as  an  interesting  person.  I  answer  that 
neither  I  nor  they  oan  form  any  idea  as  to  whether  I  shall  be 
wanted  when  I  am  gone  or  no.  The  chances  are  that  I  shall 
not. 

But  he  was  not  inclined  to  take  any  risks.  He  was 
the  residuary  of  his  own  temperament,  and  if  by  chance 
posterity  were  to  wake  up  and  take  a  violent  interest  in 
him,  he  personally  would  be  to  blame,  and  would  incur 
a  very  serious  responsibility,  if  there  were  no  documents 
forthcoming  to  satisfy  the  curiosity  of  the  new  generation. 
It  is  to  his  frank  response  to  this  instinct  of  self-preserva- 
tion that  we  owe  the  very  exhaustive  and  faithful 
narrative  of  Mr.  Festing  Jones,  as  we  did  the  precious 
"Note-books"  of  191 2. 

In  consideration  of  the  eagerness  and  sympathy  with 
which  Butler  is  followed  by  an  active  group  of  admirers 
among  the  young  w-riters  of  to-day,  it  may  be  doubtful 
whether  the  extraordinary  minuteness  of  Butler's  observa- 
tion, continued  as  it  is  with  an  equallv  extraordinary 
fullness  by  his  biographer,  may  not  have  an  evil  effect  in 
encouraging  a  taste  for  excessive  discursiveness  in  author- 
ship of  this  class.  There  have  been  very  distinguished 
examples  lately  of  abandonment  to  an  unchecked  notation 
of  detail.  It  is  scarcely  necessary  to  refer  to  the  texture 
of  the  later  novels  of  Henry  James,  or  to  the  amazing 
Cote  de  chea  Swann  of  M.  Marcel  Proust,  which  latter 
is  one  of  the  most  characteristic  successes  of  the  moment. 
This  widespread  tendency  to  consider  every  slight  observa- 
tion, whether  phenomenal  or  emotional,  worthy  of  the 
gravest  and  tenderest  analvsis,  develops  at  an  epoch  when 

'  S8 


Samuel  Butler 

the  world  is  becoming  congested  with  printed  matter,  and 
when  one  might  imagine  that  conciseness  and  selection 
would  be  the  qualities  naturally  in  fashion.  Neither 
Samuel  Butler  nor  his  biographer  conceives  it  possible 
that  anything  can  be  negligible;  to  them  the  meanest 
flower  that  blows  by  the  wayside  of  experience  gives 
thoughts  that  cannot  be  brought  to  lie  within  one  or  even 
within  ten  pages.  The  complacency  with  which  Butler 
annotates  his  own  childish  letters  to  his  mother  is  equalled 
only  by  the  gravity  with  which  Mr.  Jones  examines  those 
very  annotations. 

Not  without  a  qualm,  however,  do  I  note  this  re- 
dundancy, since  it  is  a  source  of  pleasure  to  all  but  the 
hasty  reader,  who,  indeed,  should  be  advised  not  to 
approach  Butler  at  all.  The  charm  of  his  mind  lies  in  its 
divagations,  its  inconsistencies,  its  puerile  and  lovable 
self-revelations,  and  all  these  are  encouraged  by  the  wan- 
dering style  common  to  the  author  and  to  his  biographer. 
One  of  the  most  clear-sighted  of  his  friends,  trying  to 
sum  up  his  character  at  his  death,  said  that  "he  was  too 
versatile  a  genius  ever  to  be  in  the  front  rank  of  one 
particular  line,  and  he  had  too  much  fun  in  him  to  be 
really  serious  when  he  ought  to  have  been."  But  why 
ought  he  to  have  been  "really  serious,"  and  why  should 
he  have  sought  "front  rank"  in  one  particular  line? 
This  is  the  inevitable  w^ay  in  which  a  man  of  ingenious 
originality  is  misjudged  by  those  who  have  loved  him 
most  and  who  think  they  understood  him  best.  Butler 
was  not  remarkable,  and  does  not  now  deserve  the  repu- 
tation which  his  name  enjoys,  on  account  of  the  subjects 
about  which  he  chose  to  write,  nor  on  account  of  the 
measure  of  decorum  with  which  he  approached  those 
themes,  but  in  consequence  of  the  sinuous  charm,  the 
irregular  and  arresting  originality  of  his  approach  itself, 
his  fame  having  been  indeed  rather  delayed,  and  the 
purgatory  of  his  obscurity  prolonged,  by  the  want  of 
harmony  between  most  of  the  subjects  he  selected  and  the 
manner  in  which  it  was  native  to  himself  to  treat  those 
subjects.     In  other  words,  what  makes  Butler  a  difficult 

59 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

theme  for  analysis  is  that,  unlike  most  authors,  his  genius 
is  not  illuminated,  but  positively  obscured  for  a  student 
of  to-day,  by  the  majority  of  his  controversial  writings. 
He  was  not  a  prophet;  he  was  an  inspired  "crank."  He 
is  most  characteristic,  not  when  he  is  discussing  Evolution, 
or  Christianity,  or  the  Sonnets  of  Shakespeare,  or  the 
Trapanese  Origin  of  the  "Odyssey,"  but  when  he  is 
meandering  along,  endlessly,  paradoxically,  in  the  act  of 
written  conversation  about  everything  at  large  and  nothing 
in  particular,  with  himself  as  the  central  theme. 

The  most  valuable  of  Butler's  imaginative  writings, 
and  indeed  the  most  important  from  almost  every  point 
of  view,  are  the  two  romances  which  stand  respectively  at 
the  opening  and  at  the  close  of  his  career,  like  two  golden 
pillars  supporting  the  roof  of  his  reputation.  His  earliest 
publication  (for  the  slight  and  brief  budget  of  letters  from 
New  Zealand  was  not  published  by  himself)  was  Ereivhon 
— or  "Nowhere  " — a  fantastic  Utopia  of  the  class  started 
a  century  and  a  half  ago  by  Paltock  in  his  fascinating 
adventures  of  Peter  Wilkins.  Like  Wilkins,  the  hero  of 
Erewhon  flies  from  civilization,  and  discovers  in  the 
Antarctic  world  a  race  of  semi-human  beings,  who  obey 
a  strict  code  of  morals  consistent  in  itself,  but  in  complete 
divergence  from  ours  on  many  important  points.  I  dis- 
cover no  evidence  that  Butler  ever  saw  Paltock's  romance, 
and  he  would  probably  have  been  scornful  of  the  Glums 
and  Cowries,  and  of  the  gentle  winged  people  wrapped 
in  throbbing  robes  of  their  own  substance.  But  I  think 
some  dim  report  of  an  undiscovered  country  where  ethics 
were  all  turned  topsy-turvy  may  have  started  him  on 
Erewhon.  The  other  novel,  that  which  closes  Butler's 
career  as  a  writer,  is  The  Way  of  All  Flesh,  without  a 
careful  consideration  of  which,  by  the  light  of  information 
now  supplied  by  Mr.  Festing  Jones,  no  sketch  of  Butler's 
career  can,  for  the  future,  be  attempted. 

As  early  as  1873,  Butler  confided  to  Miss  Savage — of 
whose  place  in  his  life  and  influence  upon  his  genius  I 
shall  presently  have  to  speak — that  he  was  contemplating 
the  composition  of  an  autobiographical  novel.     She  read 

60 


Samuel  Butler 

the  opening,  and  wrote,  "as  far  as  it  goes  it  is  perfect, 
and  if  you  go  on  as  you  have  begun,  it  will  be  a  beautiful 
book."  In  case  he  got  tired  of  it,  what  he  had  already 
written  might  make  "a  very  nice  finished  sketch  for  a 
magazine."  Evidently  Miss  Savage,  who  had  an  almost 
uncanny  penetration  into  Butler's  nature,  had  little  con- 
fidence in  his  perseverance  in  the  conduct  of  so  large  a 
design.  She  urged  him  on,  however,  and  it  very  early 
occurred  to  her  that  the  value  of  the  story  would  consist 
in  its  complete  veracity  as  an  autobiography.  She  faced 
Butler  with  the  charge  that  he  was  not  being  faithful  to 
himself  in  this  matter,  and  she  said,  "Is  the  narrator 
of  the  story  to  be  an  impartial  historian  or  a  special 
pleader?"  Butler  wriggled  under  her  strictures,  but 
failed  to  escape  from  them.  Finally  she  faced  him  with 
a  direct  question  : 

You  have  chosen  the  disguise  of  an  old  man  of  seventy-three 
[exactly  double  Butler's  real  age  at  that  time],  and  must  speak 
and  act  as  such.  An  old  man  of  seventy-three  would  scarcely 
talk  as  you  do,  unless  he  was  constantly  in  your  company,  and 
was  a  very  docile  old  man  indeed — and  I  don't  think  the  old 
man  who  is  telling  the  story  is  at  all  docile. 

Young  or  old,  Butler  was  never  "docile,"  and  he  w^as 
not  inclined  to  give  up  his  idealism  without  a  struggle. 
But  Miss  Savage  was  indomitable.  She  continued  to 
undermine  what  she  called  "the  special  pleader,"  on  the 
ground  that  "I  prefer  an  advocate  in  flesh  and  blood." 
Under  this  pressure,  and  stimulated  by  Miss  Savage's 
ingenuous  annotations,  Butler  adopted  more  and  more 
a  realistic  tone,  and  kept  the  story  more  and  more  closely 
on  autobiographic  lines.  It  w'as  progressing  steadily 
when  Butler  had  to  go  to  Canada  on  the  business  expe- 
dition which  cost  him  so  many  months  of  his  life,  and 
when  he  returned  to  London  he  did  not  resume  the  novel. 
He  took  it  up  again  in  1878,  and  disliked  it;  it  needed 
Miss  Savage's  energy  to  start  him  again  with  proper 
gusto.     Mr.  Festing  Jones  was  by  this  time  upon  the  spot, 

61 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

and  though  he  does  not  say  so,  he  probably  supported 
Miss  Savaoe.  They  were  the  Aaron  and  Hur  who  held 
up  the  arms  of  this  incorrigible  "special  pleader,"  and 
insisted  that  he  should  stick  to  the  truth,  and  not  embroider 
it.  In  1884  The  Way  of  All  Flesh  was  finished;  in  1885 
it  underwent  some  revision,  and  after  that  was  not  touched 
again. 

So  long  as  Butler  was  alive,  the  uncompromising 
revelations  of  his  family  life,  and  the  bitterness  of  the 
censure  of  living  persons,  which  the  novel  contained, 
made  it  impossible  to  dream  of  issuing  it.  To  do  so  would 
have  been  to  break  a  nest  of  hornets  over  Butler's  pate. 
But  the  moment  he  was  dead,  his  executor,  the  late  Mr. 
R.  A.  Streatfeild,  acting  upon  the  author's  known  wishes, 
published  The  Way  of  All  Flesh.  This  was  in  1903, 
and  the  publication  synchronized  with  the  surprising 
burst  of  critical  appreciation  which  the  announcement  of 
Butler's  death  had  awakened  in  the  Press.  In  almost  all 
unprejudiced  quarters  the  value  of  The  Way  of  All  Flesh 
as  a  sincere  and  masterly  contribution  to  imaginative 
literature,  was  acknowledged,  although  it  took  five  years 
more  for  a  second  edition  of  the  book  to  be  called  for. 
Butler,  however,  was  recognized  at  last  as  an  author  of 
distinguished  merit,  and  there  was  a  reverberation  of 
curiosity  concerning  so  remarkable  a  man  who  had  walked 
about  among  us  for  nearly  seventy  years  without  attract- 
ing any  particular  attention.  This  curiosity,  it  was 
indicated  by  his  admirers,  could  now  be  assuaged  by  a 
study  of  The  Way  of  All  Flesh,  which  was  a  faithful 
portrait  of  the  writer,  and  of  all  the  persons  who  had 
checked  his  growth  or  encouraged  his  development.  So 
the  legend  was  started  that  no  real  Life  of  Samuel  Butler 
was  required,  because  in  The  Way  of  All  Flesh  we  already 
possessed  a  complete  one. 

Apart  from  the  fact  that  the  best  of  autobiographies 
can  never  be  the  "real  life,"  because  it  can  never  depict 
the  man  quite  as  others  saw  him,  it  now  transpires — and 
this  is  perhaps  the  most  important  feature  of  Mr.  Festing 
Jones's   admirable   volumes  —  that    the    novel   cannot   be 

62 


Samuel  Butler 

accepted  as  an  autobiography  sound  at  all  points.  In 
spite  of  the  warnings  of  Miss  Savage,  and,  oddly  enough, 
most  of  all  in  the  person  of  Miss  Savage  herself,  Butler 
was  incapable  of  confronting  the  incidents  of  his  own 
life  without  colouring  them,  and  without  giving  way  to 
prejudice  in  the  statement  of  plain  facts.  He  disliked 
excessively  the  atmosphere  of  middle-class  Evangelicism 
in  which  he  had  been  brought  up,  and  we  must  dislike 
it  too,  but  we  need  not  dislike  the  persons  involved  so 
bitterly  as  Butler  did.  It  was  narrow,  sterile  and  cruel, 
and  it  deserved  no  doubt  the  irony  which  Butler  expended 
upon  it.  So  long  as  we  regard  The  Way  of  All  Flesh 
as  a  story,  invented  with  the  help  of  recollections  which 
the  novelist  was  at  liberty  to  modify  in  any  way  he  thought 
desirable,  there  is  no  quarrel  to  be  picked  with  any  part 
of  it.  But  when  we  are  led,  as  we  have  been,  to  take  it 
as  a  full  and  true  record  of  Butler's  own  life,  with  nothing 
changed  but  the  names  of  the  persons,  we  see  by  the  light 
of  Mr.  Festing  Jones  that  this  is  an  absolutely  untenable 
position.  The  Way  of  All  Flesh  is  not  an  autobiography, 
but  a  romance  founded  on  recollection. 

The  author  of  Erewhon,  who  was  christened  Samuel, 
not  in  honour  of  the  author  of  Hudibras,  but  in  memory 
of  his  own  grandfather,  the  Bishop  of  Lichfield  and 
Coventry,  was  the  son  of  Canon  Thomas  Butler,  in- 
cumbent of  Langor-with-Branston,  in  Nottinghamshire, 
where  the  younger  Samuel  was  born  on  tlie  4th  of  De- 
cember, 1835.  Readers  of  The  Way  of  All  Flesh  may 
recognize  the  Butler  family  at  Langor  in  the  very  un- 
flattering picture  of  the  Pontifexes  in  that  novel.  The 
Bishop's  grandson  disliked  him  very  much  indeed — 
"bullying,  irritable,  stupid  old  turkey-cock  " — until  1887, 
when  he  got  hold  of  the  Bishop's  letters  and  papers,  "and 
fell  over  head  and  ears  in  love  with  him."  He  excused 
his  earlier  sarcasms  by  saying — "When  I  wrote  harshly 
describing  him,  I  knew  nothing  about  my  grandfather 
except  that  he  had  been  a  great  schoolmaster — and  I  do 
not  like  schoolmasters;  and  then  a  bishop — and  I  do 
not  like  bishops;  and  that  he  was  supposed  to  be  like  my 

63 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

father."  For  llie  laltor,  who  is  Theobald  Pontifex  in  The 
Way  of  All  Flesh,  he  never  expressed  any  leniency  what- 
ever, yet  it  is  impossible  to  avoid  hoping  that  if  he  had 
studied  his  father,  as  at  the  age  of  fifty  he  studied  his 
grandfather,  he  might  have  relented  a  little  in  that 
instance  also. 

Ernest  Pontifex  says,  in  The  Way  of  All  Flesh,  that 
he  could  remember  no  feeling  towards  his  parents  during 
his  childhood  except  fear  and  shrinking.  To  Butler, 
fathers  in  general,  as  a  class,  were  "capable  de  tout," 
like  the  prophet  Habakkuk.  Mr.  Festing  Jones  prints  a 
very  explicit  paper  he  has  found  on  this  subject,  the  least 
distressing  paragraph  in  which  is  the  last,  where  Butler 
says,  "An  unkind  fate  never  threw  two  men  together  who 
were  more  naturally  uncongenial  than  my  father  and 
myself."  Canon  Butler  was  an  evangelical  clergyman 
of  the  Simeonite  type,  which  flourished  so  intensely  be- 
fore and  during  the  development  of  the  High  Church 
revival.  He  believed  in  bringing  up  children  rigidly, 
from  their  infancy,  in  the  strict  practice  of  external  re- 
ligion. If  they  were  recalcitrant,  the  love  of  God  must 
be  driven  into  them  by  their  being  whipped  or  shut  up  in 
a  cupboard,  or  docked  of  some  little  puerile  pleasure. 
Samuel  Butler  secretly  rebelled,  from  babyhood,  against 
this  stern  evangelical  discipline,  and  the  Canon,  who  had 
no  imagination,  simply  redoubled  his  severities.  It  is 
an  amusing  touch,  in  this  record  of  a  dismal  childhood, 
to  learn  that  Samuel  was  excessively  pleased,  at  the  age 
of  eight,  by  hearing  an  Italian  lady  in  Naples  say  that  a 
dear  young  friend  of  hers — ^poor  unfortunate  fellow, 
povero  disgraziato! — had  been  obliged  to  murder  his 
uncle  and  his  aunt.  Probably  the  pleasure  the  little  boy 
felt  in  hearing  of  this  "misfortune"  was  the  earliest  ex- 
pression of  that  rebellious  and  fantastic  dislike  of  con- 
ventionality which  was  to  run  through  the  whole  series 
of  the  man's  works. 

In  the  letters  from  Butler  to  his  family,  written  at 
school  and  at  college,  there  is,  however,  no  trace  of  the 
violent  antagonism  which  he  afterwards  believed  that  he 

64 


Samuel  Butler 

had  always  felt.  It  is  true  that  a  boy  who  writes  to  his 
father  and  mother,  and  indeed  in  similar  circumstances 
a  man  too,  is  constrained  to  resign  himself  to  a  certain  inno- 
cent hypocrisy.  Very  few  children  are  able  to  send  to  their 
parents,  and  very  few  parents  are  able  to  endure  from 
their  children,  a  perfectly  sincere  description  of  their  crude 
sentiments  during  adolescence.  But  if  Samuel  Butler 
was  really  tormented  at  home,  as  Ernest  Pontifex  was, 
it  is  odd  that  some  note  of  hostility  should  not  have  crept 
into  his  juvenile  correspondence.  However,  Mr.  Festing 
Jones,  who  is  as  judicious  as  a  Lord  of  x'Vppeal,  seems  to 
entertain  no  doubt  that  Canon  Butler  was  a  holy  horror, 
so  that  we  must  bow  to  his  opinion. 

The  earliest  overt  evidence  of  a  falling  out  between 
father  and  son  is  delayed  until,  in  Mr.  Jones's  unfaltering 
narrative,  we  reach  the  son's  twenty-third  year.  He  does 
not  seem,  at  first,  to  have  combated  his  father's  obstinate 
demand  that  he  should  take  orders  in  the  Church  of 
England.  That  Canon  Butler,  a  clergyman  of  clergymen, 
should  have  desired  to  see  his  Samuel  take  this  step, 
ought  not  to  seem  unreasonable,  though  it  certainly 
proved  unlucky.  In  the  novel,  it  will  be  remembered, 
Ernest  Pontifex  actually  was  ordained,  but  to  this  length 
Samuel  Butler  never  proceeded.  He  went  to  a  parish  in 
the  east  of  London  to  w^ork  with  a  parson  who  ihad  been 
one  of  his  grandfather's  pupils  at  Shrewsbury.  There 
his  faith  in  the  efficacy  of  infant  baptism  was  shaken,  and 
presently  falling,  brought  down  about  his  ears  the  whole 
fabric  of  Simeonite  Christianity  in  which  he  had  so 
assiduously  been  trained.  He  suddenly,  and  no  doubt 
abruptly,  wrote  to  the  Canon  and  said  that  he  "declined 
to  be  ordained."  From  a  carnal  as  well  as  a  spiritual  point 
of  view  this  must  have  been  a  nasty  shock  for  his  parents, 
and  Mr.  Festing  Jones  tells  us  "there  was  a  long  and 
painful  correspondence."  This  he  mercifully  spares  us, 
but  refers  us  to  The  Way  of  All  Flesh,  where  Butler  made 
dauntless  use  of  it. 

The  financial  situation  was  difficult.  Canon  Butler 
was  fairly  well-to-do,  but  he  had  other  children  to  provide 

6^ 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

for,  and  Samuel,  who  refused  to  be  a  clergyman,  went 
on  refusing,  as  it  must  have  seemed  to  his  father,  to  be 
anything  at  all.     Like  the  poet  Cowley,  he 

neither  great  at  Court  nor  in  the  War, 
Nor  at  the  Exchange  would  be,  nor  at  the  wrangling  Bar. 

All  professions  were  suggested,  and  each  in  vain.  At 
last  it  was  decided  that  Samuel  should  emigrate  to  New 
Zealand,  and  become  a  sheep  farmer.  Only  nine  years 
earlier,  a  Church  of  England  colony  had  been  founded 
at  Canterbury,  in  the  South  Island,  and  the  town  of 
Christchurch  had  been  founded.  It  had  enjoyed  a  great 
success,  and  by  the  year  1859,  when  Butler  landed,  almost 
all  the  sheep  lands  had  been  already  taken  up.  At  last 
he  found  an  unoccupied  run  at  the  "back  of  beyond," 
and  built  a  little  homestead  for  himself,  which  he  called 
Mesopotamia.  It  is  needless  to  dwell  on  this  episode  of 
Butler's  life,  further  than  to  point  out  that  it  proved  him 
capable  of  sustained  physical  industry  and  of  considerable 
financial  adroitness.  The  remainder  of  his  career  hardly 
suggests  the  possession  of  either.  The  New  Zealand 
episode  is  sufficiently  dealt  with  in  Butler's  own  book, 
A  First  Year  in  Canterbury  Settlement,  which,  by  the 
way,  shows  no  trace  of  the  author's  subsequent  merit  as 
a  writer.  In  June,  1864,  he  sailed  homeward  from  the 
port  of  Lyttelton,  but  not  alone,  and  we  now  approach 
the  strangest  incident  of  his  life. 

It  was  to  be  expected  that  the  ;^4,40o  which  Butler 
had  received  from  his  father  in  1859  would  by  this  time 
have  dwindled  to  zero.  Not  at  all ;  it  had  swelled  to 
;i{,'8,ooo.  But  just  before  he  left  New  Zealand  a  young 
man,  called  Charles  Pauli,  whom  he  had  known  but  very 
slightly  as  a  journalist  in  Christchurch,  and  who  had  no 
claim  upon  Butler  of  any  sort  or  species,  came  to  him  and 
asked  him  to  pay  for  his  passage  back  to  England,  and 
to  advance  him  ;^2O0  a  year  for  three  years.  "To  me," 
wrote  Butler  in  1897,  "i"  those  days  this  seemed  perfectly 
easy;  and  Pauli,  I  have  not  the  smallest  doubt,  intended 

66 


Samuel  Butler 

and  fully  believed — for  his  temperament  was  always  san- 
guine— that  he  should  be  able  to  repay  me."  Butler  had 
very  little  insight  into  the  "temperament  "  of  Pauli,  and 
the  whole  of  the  extraordinary  story  increases  our 
conviction  that  this  sardonic  and  sarcastic  analyst  of 
imaginary  life  was  as  powerless  as  a  child  in  face  of 
reality.  The  dreadful  Pauli  adventure,  told  for  the  first 
time  by  Mr.  Festing  Jones,  in  his  deliberate,  unimpas- 
sioned  way,  is  the  most  amazing  revelation  of  simplicity 
traded  upon  by  fraud  that  it  is  possible  to  imagine. 

There  soon  proved  to  be  a  complete  absence  of  harmony 
in  the  tastes  of  Butler  and  Pauli,  who  had  really  nothing 
in  common.  Yet  they  settled  together,  when  they  arrived 
in  London,  in  rooms  in  Clifford's  Inn,  Fleet  Street. 
There  Butler  lived  for  all  the  rest  of  his  life,  thirty-eight 
years;  but  presently  Pauli  went  elsewhere.  Then  the 
relations  of  the  two  became  incomprehensible.  Pauli  was 
very  irritable,  and  constantly  found  fault  with  Butler. 
He  refused  to  let  Butler  know  his  address,  and  yet  was 
continually  sponging  upon  him.  He  said  that  he  could 
get  no  help  from  his  own  parents,  and  that  Butler  stood 
between  him  and  starvation.  For  three  years  Pauli  did 
not  attempt  to  work.  At  last,  in  1867,  he  was  called  to 
the  Bar.  He  lunched  with  Butler  three  times  a  week, 
when  he  always  said  that  he  was  earning  nothing. 
Butler's  own  statement,  written  in  1898,  the  year  after 
Pauli's  death,  is  as  follows  : 

I  have  no  means  of  ascertaining-  how  much  Pauli  had  from 
me  between  the  years  1864  and  1881  (but  it  exceeded  ;^3,5oo). 
I  kept  no  accounts;  I  took  no  receipts  from  him;  the  under- 
standing was  that  he  would  repay  me  when  he  came  into  his 
reversion.  ...  In  1879  I  only  admitted  to  my  father  having 
helped  Pauli  from  time  to  time  ;  the  fact  was,  I  had  done  every- 
thing. ...  I  had  more  than  shared  every  penny  I  had  with 
him,  but  I  believed  myself  to  be  doing-  it  out  of  income,  and  to 
have  a  right  to  do  it. 

Throughout  the  long  periods  in  which  Butler  was  hard 
pressed   for   sufficient    money    to   exist — times    in    which 

67 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

there  were  painful  and  unseemly  squabbles  about  an 
allowance  between  his  father  and  himself — he  was  support- 
ing Pauli,  whose  means  of  subsistence  he  took  no  pains 
to  investigate,  and  who,  in  full  cognition  of  Butler's 
attenuated  sources  of  income,  punctually  icx)k  half  for 
himself.     Mr.  Festing  Jones's  statement  is  amazing  : 

Pauli  was  called  to  the  Bar  in  1867,  and  took  chambers  in 
Lincoln's  Inn  for  his  work.  He  told  Butler  where  they  were, 
so  that  he  could  write  if  he  had  any  communication  to  make 
to  him  that  would  not  wait  till  they  met;  but  Butler  was  not  to 
go  there.  Of  course,  he  could  have  gone,  but  he  did  not.  He 
could  have  found  out  in  a  hundred  ways  where  Pauli  lived  if 
he  had  set  about  it;  but,  knowing"  that  Pauli  did  not  wish  it, 
he  did  nothing". 

At  last,  in  1897,  ^fter  having  shared  his  poverty  with 
this  strange  friend  for  thirty-three  years,  Butler  read  in 
The  Times  that  Pauli  was  dead.  Then,  at  last,  he  made 
inquiries,  and  found  that  for  a  great  many  years  past 
Pauli's  income  from  the  law  had  exceeded  ;;^70o  a  year, 
and  for  nearly  twenty  had  been  over  ;^  1,000.  Pauli  left 
^9,000,  not  a  penny  of  it  to  Butler,  whose  parasite  he  had 
been  for  the  greater  part  of  his  life,  when  every  five-pound 
note  was  of  consequence  to  Butler.  One  knows  not  which 
to  be  more  astounded  at — heartless  greediness  on  the  one 
side,  or  fatuous  simplicity  on  the  other.  When  all  the 
evidence  came  out  at  last  beyond  all  further  concealment, 
Butler  wrote:  "I  understand  now  why  Pauli  preserved 
such  an  iron  silence  when  I  implored  him  to  deal  with  me 
somewhat  after  the  fashion  in  which  I  had  dealt  with 
him."  [That  is  to  say,  in  telling  him  precisely  what 
Butler's  exact  financial  position  was.]  "The  iniquity  of  the 
whole  thing,  as  it  first  struck  me  in  full  force,  upset  me." 

This  "squalid  and  miserable  story"  is  told  with  in- 
exorable fullness  by  Mr.  Festing  Jones.  What  is  very 
remarkable  about  it  is  the  evidence  it  gives  of  Butler's 
irregular  penetration  into  character.  He  could  be  ex- 
tremely acute  in  one  direction  and  absolutely  obtuse  in 

68 


Samuel  Butler 

another.  The  incredible  indulgence  which  permitted  him 
to  be  the  dupe  and  victim  of  a  scoundrel  like  Pauli  for 
more  than  thirty  years  seems  incompatible  with  the  in- 
tense and  suspicious  analysis  which  he  expended  on  the 
motives  of  his  father.  After  all,  when  the  worst  of  Canon 
Butler  is  admitted,  he  was  a  Christian  and  a  gentleman  by 
the  side  of  the  appalling  Pauli.  Yet  Butler  would  sacri- 
fice his  father,  and  actually  tell  falsehoods,  for  the  purpose 
of  screening  and  enriching  Pauli  (see  Vol.  I.,  p,  114), 
of  whose  villainy  he  could  at  any  moment  have  assured 
himself,  and  with  whom  he  practically  admits  that  he  had 
nothing  in  common. 

The  Pauli  episode  is  valuable  in  supplying  light  on 
certain  defects  in  Butler's  intellectual  composition.  In 
measure,  it  tends  to  explain  the  inconsistencies,  the  irregu- 
larities of  his  mental  life,  and  of  his  action  as  a  scholar. 
He  was  the  opposite  of  those  who  see  life  steadily,  and  see 
it  whole.  He  had  no  wide  horizons,  but  he  investigated 
a  corner  or  a  section  of  a  subject  with  a  burning  glass 
which  left  all  other  parts  of  the  surface  in  darkness.  There 
were  Paulis  on  his  mental  horizon ;  there  were  in  almost 
everything  he  approached  passages  where  his  want  of 
appreciation,  his  want  (let  us  boldly  say)  of  elementary 
insight,  produced  the  oddest  effect  of  imperfection.  His 
literary  judgments  were  saugrenu  to  the  last  extreme. 
What  are  we  to  think  of  a  man  who  lays  it  down  that 
"Blake  was  no  good  because  he  learnt  Italian  to  study 
Dante,  and  Dante  was  no  good  because  he  was  so  fond 
of  Virgil,  and  Virgil  was  no  good  because  Tennyson  ran 
him;  and  as  for  Tennyson,  well,  Tennyson  goes  without 
saying  "  ?  There  is  no  critical  meaning  in  such  outbursts ; 
they  would  be  almost  imbecile  in  their  aimless  petulance 
if  we  did  not  understand  that  Virgil  and  Dante  and  Blake 
lay  in  the  dark  segment  of  Butler's  vision,  and  that  he  had 
not  so  much  formed  an  adverse  opinion  of  their  merits  as 
no  opinion  at  all.  If,  as  surprisingly  he  did  on  every 
occasion,  he  heaped  contempt  on  Virgil,  it  was  simply 
because  he  wanted  to  get  Virgil  well  out  of  the  way  of 
Homer,  on  whom  his  enthusiasm  was  concentrated. 
F  6q 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

It  was  so  in  all  things.  Butler  despised  the  great 
Venetian  painters,  not  because  he  had  devoted  attention 
to  their  faults,  but  because  they  stood  in  the  way  of 
Giovanni  and  Gentile  Bellini,  to  whom  he  had  dedicated 
a  frenzied  cult.  "Titian,  Leonardo,  Raffaelle  and  Michel 
Angelo,  well,  to  speak  quite  plainly,  I  like  none  of  them," 
he  wrote  in  the  last  year  of  his  life.  In  music  it  was  just 
the  same.  Butler  attached  himself,  from  early  youth  to 
the  grave,  to  Handel  in  an  almost  maniacal  infatuation. 
In  order  to  clear  a  space,  as  it  were,  round  this  solitary 
object  of  his  worship,  he  covered  Beethoven  and  Bach 
with  contempt;  and  if  anyone  forced  him  to  listen  to  the 
"Requiem  "  of  Mozart,  he  stopped  his  ears  and  hummed 
"Loathsome  urns,  disclose  your  treasure,"  to  drown  the 
hideous  Austrian  discord.  For  Butler,  "Bach  wriggles; 
Wagner  writhes."  All  the  masterpieces  of  the  world  of 
music  he  sweeps  together  in  a  universal  disapproval  as 
"heartless  failures,"  whereas  of  Llandel's  least  remarkable 
passages  he  calls  out,  "Can  human  genius  do  more?" 
The  result  is  that  Butler  is  interesting  and  sometimes 
valuable  when  he  praises;  when  he  blames,  he  is  some- 
times amusing,  but  more  often  impertinent  and  tiresome. 
What  is  the  point  of  calling  Plato  one  of  the  "Seven 
Humbugs  of  Christendom,"  or  of  talking  of  "that  damned 
Republic"?  To  pretend  to  admire  these  peevish  out- 
bursts, however  much  we  may  be  stimulated  by  the  better 
sides  of  Butler's  intelligence,  is  abject. 

No  section  of  Mr.  Festing  Jones's  biography  is  more 
interesting  than  that  in  which,  in  the  patient,  judicious 
manner  in  which  he  so  eminently^  excels,  he  depicts  the 
relation  of  Butler  to  Miss  Savage.  Readers  of  The  Way 
of  All  Flesh  are  familiar  with  the  figure  of  Alethea  Ponti- 
fex,  who  occupies  the  position  of  heroine  in  that  novel. 
It  has  long  been  known  that  this  was  the  portrait  of  a 
friend  whom  Butler  had  studied,  confided  in,  and  deeply 
valued.  In  what  degree  it  was  an  accurate  portrait  has 
not  hitherto  been  known.  I  have  no  hesitation  in  saying 
that  the  chapters  which  deal  with  this  situation — and  they 
are  executed  with  as  much  delicacy  as  realism — form  the 

70 


Samuel  Butler 

most  unhackneyed  and  the  most  excitinj]^  section  of  Mr. 
Jones's  volumes.  They  illuminate  in  portions,  and  they 
leave  darker  than  ever  in  other  parts,  the  rugged  surface 
of  Butler's  extraordinary  character;  and  I  regret  that 
exigencies  of  space  do  not  permit  me  to  do  justice  to 
documents  so  remarkable.     But  yet,  something  I  must  say. 

The  Alethea  of  the  novel  was  so  far  from  being  an 
exact  portrait  that  the  sitter,  after  studying  every  line  and 
touch  of  it,  is  supposed,  was  supposed  by  Butler  himself, 
not  to  have  perceived  that  it  was  intended  for  her.  This, 
however,  we  must  regard  as  hardly  possible  in  the  case 
of  one  so  passionately  clear-sighted,  but  there  were  many 
reasons  why  she  should  adopt  such  an  attitude.  Eliza 
Mary  Ann  Savage  was  a  governess,  whom  Butler  met 
about  1870,  when  he  and  she  were  art  students  together 
at  Heatherley's.  They  were  nearly  of  the  same  age, 
which  at  that  time  would  be  thirty-four.  They  were 
immediately  drawn  together  by  a  singular  parallelism  in 
temper  and  sympathy.  Miss  Savage  read  the  MS.  of 
Erewhon,  and  minutely  criticized  it.  From  this  time, 
1871  to  1885,  when  she  died,  Butler  submitted  to  her 
everything  he  wrote,  and,  obstinate  as  he  was  in  the  face 
of  all  other  censures,  invariably  remodelled  his  work  in 
accordance  with  her  criticisms  and  suggestions.  She 
supported  him  in  all  his  enthusiasms,  and  shared  all  his 
prejudices.  She  was  a  very  well-read  woman,  and  was 
able  to  follow  Butler  into  the  remotest  recesses  of  his 
studies.  She  responded  to  his  lightest  touch  like  a  deli- 
cate musical  instrument,  and  yet  was  rigid  in  opposing 
any  divergence  from  what  she  conceived  to  be  the  normal 
line  his  talent  ought  to  take.  She  was  as  stringently 
hostile  to  Christianity,  as  contemptuous  of  Darwin  and 
Huxley,  as  infatuated  about  Handel,  as  haughtily  an 
enfant  terrible  of  the  intelligence  as  he  was,  and  the  degree 
to  which  the  admirers  of  Butler's  books  are  indebted  to 
her  can  never  be  definitely  known,  but  is  certainly  very 
great. 

Alethea  Pontifex,  in  The  Way  of  All  Flesh,  is  tall, 
handsome,  with  fine  blue  eyes.     Miss  Savage  was  short, 

71 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

insignificant,  and  plain,  with  brown  eyes;  she  suffered 
from  hip  disease;  physically,  she  was  quite  unattractive. 
This  introduces  into  the  real  history  an  element  of  pathos 
and  of  pain  which  raises  it  to  a  far  higher  level  of  human 
interest  than  the  novel  has  to  offer  us.  To  Miss  Savage, 
in  her  isolated  state,  Butler  was  the  whole  world;  and 
it  is  perfectly  evident — Mr.  Testing  Jones  need  not  hesi- 
tate so  conscientiously  in  admitting  it  —  that  she  was 
absorbingly,  unalterably  in  love  with  Butler.  She  lived, 
quite  unupbraiding,  in  the  intermittent  light  of  his 
countenance.  For  nearly  twenty  years  they  were,  men- 
tally, like  a  devoted  husband  and  wife,  yet  the  anomaly 
of  their  relations  never  struck  Butler,  to  whom  Miss 
Savage  was  a  comrade  of  perfect  sympathy,  and  no  more. 
He  did  not  observe,  until  Miss  Savage  was  dead,  that 
she  had  felt  towards  him  otherwise  than  he  felt  towards 
her.  He  wrote,  "I  valued  her,  but  she  perfectly  under- 
stood that  I  could  do  no  more."  Did  she?  Mr.  Festing 
Jones  prints  a  sonnet  of  Butler's,  written  in  1901,  which 
seems  to  me  to  be  one  of  the  most  amazing  pieces  of 
self-revelation  that  I  know  : 

And  now,  though  twenty  yciars  are  come  and  gone, 

That  little  lame  lady's  face  is  with  me  still; 
Never  a  day  but  what,  on  every  one. 

She  dwells  with  me  as  dwell  she  ever  will. 
She  said  she  wished  I  knew  not  wrong  from  right ; 

It  was  not  that ;  I  knew,  and  would  have  chosen 
Wrong  if  I  could,  but,  in  my  own  despite, 

Power  to  choose  wrong  in  my  chilled  veins  was  frozen. 
'Tis  said  that  if  a  woman  woo,  no  man 

Should  leave  her  till  she  have  prevailed ;  and,  true, 
A  man  will  yield  for  pity  if  he  can. 

But  if  the  flesh  rebels,  what  can  he  do? 

I  could  not ;  hence  I  grieve  my  whole  life  long 
The  wrong  I  did  in  that  I  did  no  Avrong. 

Such  fragments  of  Miss  Savage's  letters  as  Mr.  Festing 
Jones  prints  show  that  she  was  an  admirable  correspondent. 
Butler  put  her  letters  together  in  a  separate  collection, 

72 


Samuel  Butler 

edited,  annotated,  and  ready  for  the  Press.  This  is  to 
be  published  some  day  in  a  volume  by  itself,  and  will 
have  a  pathetic  value.  But  I  confess  to  a  certain  feeling 
of  regret  that  the  inner  being  of  this  obscure,  pathetic, 
and  self-sacrificing  woman  should  be  immolated  any 
further  on  the  altar  of  Butler's  egotism.  My  own  instinct 
would  be  to  say  :  Let  poor  Miss  Savage,  out  of  whose 
painful  and  imperfect  existence  so  much  "copy  "  has 
already  been  made,  sleep  on  undisturbed  under  her 
mouldering  headstone  at  Finchley.  But  Mr.  Festing 
Jones  knows  best. 

The  most  agreeable  parts  of  this  biography,  at  all 
events  those  which  give  us  the  most  genial  impression 
of  Butler  as  a  companion,  deal  with  his  repeated  visits  to 
Italy.  These  tours  inspired,  or  were  used  to  produce 
material  for,  a  very  pleasant  section  of  his  literary  work. 
If  we  distinguish  between  the  wit  and  picturesqueness  of 
the  ornament  in  Butler's  controversial  writings,  and  the 
actual  basal  texture  of  those  writings,  I  do  not  see  how 
a  reasonable  criticism  can  any  longer  pretend  to  set  high 
value  on  his  angry  denunciations  of  the  whole  Darwinian 
theory  of  evolution,  or  on  his  diatribes  about  Unconscious 
Memory.  There  is  a  terrible  work  of  his,  published  in 
1887,  called  Luck  or  Cunning  as  the  Main  Means  of 
Organic  Modification;  there  is  another,  of  1882,  called 
Evolution,  Old  and  New.  They  are  unreadable.  His 
religious  polemic  was  even  more  disagreeable  than  his 
scientific,  and  the  lumbering  sarcasm  of  the  attack  on 
Christianity,  called  The  Fair  Haven,  is  an  epitome  of  all 
that  is  most  unpleasing  in  the  attitude  of  Butler. 
Unctuous  sarcasm  so  sustained  as  to  deceive  the  very 
elect,  and  "affectation  of  the  tone  of  indignant  orthodoxy," 
have  a  tendency  to  grow  rancid  in  the  passage  of  years, 
and  to  become  exceedingly  unappetizing.  Samuel  Butler, 
whose  rashness  was  astounding,  had  the  courage  to  call 
his  homonym  of  the  Analogy  a  "poor  creature  "  !  What 
would  Joseph  Butler,  revisiting  the  glimpses  of  the  moon, 
think  of  the  author  of  The  Fair  Haven? 

There  is  nothing  of  this  incongruity  in  the  books  which 

73 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

are  founded  on  memories  of  Italian  travel.  Here  the 
charm  of  Hutler's  style  is  expended,  with  a  thousand 
oddities  and  j^layfulncsscs,  on  subjects  which  blossom 
in  its  atmospliere.  It  is  very  slranj^e  that  Alps  and 
Sanctuaries  (1882),  and  Ex  Volo  (1888),  should  share  the 
neglect  which  was  so  unbrokenly  the  fate  of  Butler's 
publications,  for  these  were  charming  and  original  to  a 
high  degree,  and  they  illustrate,  without  any  disadvantage, 
the  whimsical  penetration  of  his  mind  and  the  playful 
melody  of  his  style  at  its  best.  The  Authoress  of  the 
Odyssey  (1897),  which  Hellenists  found  it  impossible  to 
take  as  a  serious  contribution  to  scholarship,  was  another 
of  these  by-products  of  travel  in  Sicily,  and  contained 
very  numerous  pages,  which,  whether  convincing  or  no, 
were  exceedingly  picturesque  and  entertaining.  No  cul- 
tivated man  or  woman  will,  in  the  future,  visit  Trapani  or 
ascend  to  the  platforms  of  Mount  Eryx  without  remem- 
bering how  Butler  was  taken  to  the  grotto  where  Ulysses 
hid  his  treasure,  or  how  the  Sicilian  descendants  of  the 
Cyclopes  treated  him  as  a  royal  personage. 

Not  much  new  light  is  thrown  on  the  purely  literary 
characteristics  of  Butler  by  Mr.  Festing  Jones's  biography. 
He  has  not  dwelt  at  length  on  the  individual  works,  nor 
at  all  on  the  general  position  of  their  author  among  his 
contemporaries.  He  left  himself  no  space  to  go  into  such 
questions,  being  fully  occupied  with  the  task  of  inter- 
preting and  illuminating  the  personal  characteristics  of 
his  subject.  He  is  an  unflinching  portraitist,  and  in  a 
painting  of  Oliver  Cromwell  from  the  life  would  be  sure 
to  do  full  justice  to  the  wen.  The  rugged  surface  of 
Samuel  Butler  lends  itself  to  such  realism — and  I  will  not 
say  that  Mr.  Jones  does  not  approach  the  confines  of  the 
superfluous  in  the  excessive  minuteness  of  his  notes.  We 
are  assured  that  Butler  took  eight  handkerchiefs  and  three 
pairs  of  socks  with  him  when  he  went  abroad,  and  that 
he  very  wisely  carried  diarrhoea  pills  in  the  handle  half 
of  his  Gladstone  bag.  When  Butler  bought  himself  a 
new  wash-hand  basin,  in  1887,  the  fact  is  duly  recorded. 
We  are  told  that  once,  in  1886,  he  swept  every  corner  of 

74 


Samuel  Butler 

every  room  of  his  lodgings  with  tea-leaves,  and  that  it 
made  him  perspire  freely.  That  there  will  be  readers 
who  do  not  care  how  many  times  Butler  brushed  his  hair 
every  day,  nor  on  what  occasion  he  wore  "the  high  hat 
which  appears  in  the  corner  of  the  picture  in  his  room," 
I  am  not  inclined  to  deny,  but  I  am  not  of  them.  These 
little  things,  recounted  with  Mr.  Festing  Jones's  humorous 
serenity,  are  my  delight.  If  some  contemporary  had  re- 
corded the  fact  that  Shakespeare  habitually  soaked  the 
crust  of  his  manchet  in  his  last  mouthful  of  sack,  or  that 
he  wore  out  his  left  shoe  faster  than  his  right,  how  grateful 
we  should  be  for  the  information.  Only,  there  must  come 
into  our  consideration  :  Are  Butler  and  Shakespeare 
figures  of  equal  significance,  apart  from  their  shoes  and 
their  hair-brushes? 

1  here  is  less  room  for  divergence  of  judgment  on  the 
question  of  the  way  in  which  Mr.  Jones  has  revealed  the 
moral  and  social  characteristics  of  his  hero.  Here  he  could 
hardly  be  excessive.  The  amiability,  the  ruggedness,  the 
nervous  instability,  the  obstinacy  as  of  a  rock,  the  tender- 
ness and  the  sardonic  bitterness  which  made  up  so  strange 
an  amalgam,  are  all  frankly  revealed.  It  is  for  us  to 
arrange  them,  if  we  can,  into  a  consistent  portrait  of  a 
most  inconsistent  figure.  Here  is,  taken  at  random,  an 
entry  of  Butler's  own,  which  gives  a  good  example  of 
several  of  his  characteristics  : 

17th  April  1895.  I  travelled  from  Patros  to  Athens  with  a 
young  Turk,  about  thirty  years  old,  and  his  dog — an  English 
terrier.  We  were  alone  in  the  carriage  the  greater  part  of 
the  time,  and  I  suppose  the  poor  dog  was  bored ;  at  any  rate, 
after  a  while,  he  made  up  to  me.  He  licked  me  all  over  my 
face,  and  then  began  to  pretend  that  my  coat  pocket  had  got 
a  rat  in  it  which  he  must  catch.  I  was  so  flattered  at  being 
made  up  to  by  anyone  or  anything  who  seemed  to  tell  me  I 
was  a  nice  person,  that  I  let  him  go  on  and  hunt  for  rats  all 
over  me,  till  at  last  his  master  interposed  in  beautiful  English, 
and  then  we  talked.  He  was  a  Secretary  to  the  Turkish 
Legation,  and  was  very  clever  and  nice. 

75 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

The  incident  could  Jiardly  be  more  Iriflinf;,^,  but  it  is 
inimitably  told;  and  it  reveals  not  merely  a  mastery  of 
minute  description,  but  the  self-tormenting  temperament 
of  a  man  of  extraordinary  talent  who,  for  some  unfathom- 
able reason,  though  love  was  in  his  heart,  was  for  ever 
out  of  harmony  with  the  world,  and  suspicious  of  those 
whom  he  would  fain  have  ingratiated.  Those  are  the  main 
lineaments  which  Mr.  Festing  Jones's  biography  reveals, 
and  they  are  those  of  a  miniaturist  touching  his  ivory 
with  a  fastidious  brush,  and  of  a  "born  orphan  "  who 
could  not  find  a  home  in  the  wilderness  of  jarring 
humanity. 


76 


A    NOTE    ON    CONGREVE 

GONGREVE'S  principal  Continental  critic  has  re- 
marked that  literary  history  has  behaved  towards 
him  in  a  very  stepmotherly  fashion  {sehr  stief- 
miitterlich).  There  is  no  other  English  poet  of  equal 
rank  of  the  last  two  centuries  and  a  half  whose  biography 
has  been  so  persistently  neglected.  When,  in  1888,  I 
wrote  my  Life  of  Congreve  I  had  had  no  predecessor  since 
John  Oldmixon,  masquerading  under  the  pseudonym  of 
"Charles  Wilson,"  published  that  farrago  of  lies  and  non- 
sense which  he  called  Memoirs  of  The  Life,  Writings  and 
Amours  of  William  Congreve,  Esq.,  in  1730.  In  this 
kingdom  of  the  blind,  however  one-eyed,  I  continue  to 
be  king,  since  in  the  thirty-three  years  succeeding  the  issue 
of  my  biography  no  one  has  essayed  to  do  better  what  I 
did  as  well  as  I  could.  The  only  exception  is  the  William 
Congreve,  sein  Lcben  und  seine  Lustspiele,  published  in 
1897  by  Dr.  D.  Schmid,  who  was,  I  believe,  and  perhaps 
still  is,  a  professor  in  the  University  of  Graz  in  Austria. 
I  darted,  full  of  anticipation,  to  the  perusal  of  Dr. 
Schmid's  volume,  but  was  completely  disappointed.  He 
reposes  upon  me  with  a  touching  uniformity;  he  quotes 
me  incessantly  and  with  courteous  acknowledgment;  but 
I  am  unable  to  discover  in  his  whole  monograph  one  grain 
of  fact,  or  correction  of  fact,  not  known  to  me  in  1888. 

In  spite  of  this,  I  have  always  believed  that  someone 
with  more  patience  and  skill  than  I  possess  would  be  able 
to  add  much  to  our  knowledge  of  a  man  who  lived  with 
the  Pope  and  Swift  and  Addison  of  whom  w^e  know  so 
much.  The  late  George  A.  Aitken,  who  seemed  to  carry 
about  with  him  a  set  of  Rontgen  rays  which  he  applied 
to  the  members  of  the  Age  of  Anne,  would  have  been  the 

77 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

man  k)  do  it.  Not  very  long'  before  his  lamented  death 
I  urj^ed  the  task  upon  Aitken  ;  but  his  mind  was  set  on 
other  things,  on  Prior  in  particular.  I  do  not  know  why 
it  is  that  Congreve,  one  of  the  great  dramatists  of  the 
world,  perhaps  our  greatest  social  playwright,  seems  to 
lack  personal  attractiveness.  It  is  a  scandal  that  he  has 
never  been  edited.  His  plays  are  frequently,  but  always 
imperfectly,  reprinted,  and  without  any  editorial  care.  I 
was  rejoiced  to  see  that  Mr.  Montague  Summers,  than 
whom  no  one  living  is  more  competent  to  carry  out  such  a 
labour,  proposed  to  edit  Congreve's  plays.  But  even  he 
did  not  intend  to  mclude  the  poems,  the  novel,  or  the 
letters;  and  I  have  heard  no  more  of  his  project.  To  the 
book  collector  the  folio  publications  of  Congreve  in  verse 
are  precious  and  amusing,  but  they  have  never  attracted 
the  notice  of  a  bibliographer.  Scholarship  has,  indeed, 
been  stiefmiitterlich  towards  Congreve,  as  the  Austrian 
critic  said. 

My  excuse  for  recalling  this  subject  is  the  fact  that  I 
am  able,  through  the  kindness  of  Mr.  Thos.  J.  Wise,  to 
announce  the  existence  of  a  work  by  Congreve  hitherto 
unknown  and  unsuspected  in  its  original  form.  In  the 
matchless  library  of  Mr.  Wise  there  lurks  an  anonymous 
quarto  of  which  the  complete  title  is:  "An  Impossible 
Thing.  A  Tale.  London:  Printed:  And  Sold  by  J. 
Roberts  in  Warwick-Lane,  MDCCXX."  This  was  shown 
by  Mr.  Wise  to  several  of  our  best  authorities,  who  com- 
bined in  the  conjecture  that  it  must  be  a  hitherto  unknown 
work  by  Prior.  Yet  since  the  poet's  death — and  this 
shows  how  little  anybody  reads  Congreve — the  contents 
of  Mr.  Wise's  quarto  have  appeared  in  each  successive 
edition  of  the  Poems.  But  before  this  was  perceived 
the  truth  had  dawned  upon  Mr.  Wise,  who,  turning  over 
the  Historical  Account  of  the  English  Poets,  a  publication 
by  Curll  in  1720,  found  that  the  following  entry  occurs  in 
the  "Corrigenda  "  : 

Mr.  Congfreve.     This  Gentleman  has  lately  oblig-'d  us  with 
two  Tales  from  Fontaine,  entitled, 

78 


A  Note  on  Congreve 

I.  The  Impossible  Thing. 

II.  The  Man  That  lost  his  Heifer. 

These  form  his  pamphlet  of  the  sam.e  year,  1720.  When 
Mr.  Wise  was  kind  enough  to  point  this  out  to  me  it 
was  only  left  for  me  to  add  that  the  anonymous  Hislorical 
Account  was  the  work  of  Giles  Jacob,  the  friend  whose 
notes  on  Congreve's  life  form  the  nucleus  of  all  we  know 
about  him.  Thus  the  authorship  of  the  two  poems  was 
proved.  And  it  was  only  after  that  proof  that  I  turned 
to  the  index  of  the  old  editions  and  found  there  the  two 
poems,  lurking  unsuspected.  I  blush  to  recall  the  painful 
incident. 

However,  the  separate  publication  of  the  two  poems 
in  a  quarto  of  1720  is  a  wholly  unrecorded  fact,  and 
important  to  bibliographers.  The  Peasant  in  Search  of 
his  Heifer  is  added  apparently  as  an  after-thought,  to  fill 
up  the  sheet.  An  Impossible  Thing  opens  with  these 
lines : 

To  thee,  Dear  Dick,  this  TaJe  I  send, 

Both  as  a  Critick  and  a  Friend. 

I  tell  it  with  some  Variation 

(Not  alto'gether  a  Translation) 

From  La  Fontaine;  an  Author,   Dick, 

Whose  Muse  would  touch  thee  to  the  quick. 

The  Subject  is  of  that  same  kind 

To  which  thy   Heart  seems  most  inclin'd. 

How  Verse  may  alter  it,  God  knows ; 

Thou  lov'st  it  well,   I'm  sure,   in  Prose. 

So  without  Preface,  or  Pretence, 

To  hold  thee  longer  in  Suspense, 

I  shall  proceed,  as  I  am  able, 

To  the  Recital  of  my  Fable. 

He  does  proceed,  not  without  considerable  indelicacy,  but 
in  excellent  running  verse.  The  "Dick  "  who  was  to 
enjoy  it  I  conjecture — and  in  this  Mr.  Austin  Dobson 
confirmed  me — to  have  been  Richard  Shelton,  who  is  con- 
nected with  Prior's  Alma  and  A  Case  Stated.  Prior  and 
Congreve  have  so  much  in  common  that  it  is  tantalizing 

79 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

not  to  be  able  to  p.ersuade  them  to  throw  hght  upon  one 
another j  they  were  hauntinj^  the  same  coffee-houses  when 
Swift  was  writing-  to  Stella  in  1710. 

The  discovery,  after  200  years,  of  a  unique  copy  of  an 
unsuspected  separate  publication  by  Congreve  confirms 
a  suspicion  of  mine  that  other  such  pamphlets  may  exist. 
The  earliest  attempt  at  a  bibliography  was  made  by  Giles 
Jacob,  evidently  under  the  poet's  own  eye,  in  1720.  Jacob 
gives  a  list  of  poems,  with  which  "the  ingenious  Mr. 
Congreve,  besides  his  excellent  Dramatick  Works,  has 
oblig'd  the  Publick,"  but  he  adds  no  dates.  Of  these 
poems  the  first  is  An  Epistle  to  the  Right  Honourable 
Charles  Lord  Halifax,  and  the  six  next  are  odes  of  each  of 
which  we  possess  the  text  in  folio  form.  But  of  the  Epistle 
to  Halifax  no  separate  edition  is  known,  and  it  appears 
first  in  the  octavo  of  17 10.  But  I  cannot  help  suspecting 
that  Giles  Jacob  possessed,  or  could  refer  to,  a  folio  sheet 
of  (probably)  1694,  ^^^^  year  in  which  Halifax,  to  reward 
Congreve  for  the  dedication  of  The  Double  Dealer,  is 
supposed  to  have  appointed  him  a  Commissioner  for 
licensing  hackney  coaches.  But  I  have  shown  how  con- 
fused is  all  the  evidence  with  regard  to  Congreve's  offices, 
which  roused  Thackeray  to  such  superfluous  indignation. 
Perhaps  the  shilly-shallying  of  Charles  Montague  had 
something  to  do  with  the  suppression  of  an  original  folio 
of  the  Epistle,  if  it  ever  existed.  In  any  case,  a  single 
sheet  with,  or  more  likely  without,  the  signature  of  Mr. 
Congreve  is  worth  looking  out  for. 

As  thirty-three  years  have  passed  since  my  Life  of 
Congreve  was  published  I  venture  to  take  occasion  to  men- 
tion here  one  or  two  slight  matters  which  I  should  like 
any  possessors  of  that  volume  to  interpolate.  If  I  had 
the  opportunity  to  issue  a  new  edition  I  should  further 
enlarge  on  a  matter  which  I  did  make  prominent,  the  very 
leading  part  which  the  veteran  Dryden  took  in  advancing 
the  fortunes  of  his  young  and  hitherto  unknown  rival. 
The  episode  is  a  charming  one,  and  I  have  now  some  in- 
stances of  it  which  escaped  me  in  1888.  As  is  known, 
Congreve  came  up  from  the  country  some  time  in  1692. 

80 


A  Note  on  Congreve 

He  was  introduced  by  Southerne  to  Dryden,  who  took  a 
great  fancy  to  him  at  once.  Dryden  was  preparing  a 
composite  translation  of  Juvenal,  and  he  gave  the  young 
man  the  Eleventh  Satire  to  turn.  Next  came  Dryden 's 
Persius,  to  which  Congreve  prefixed  a  splendid  poem  of 
compliment :  the  triumph  of  The  Old  Bachelor  followed 
in  January.  All  this,  and  more,  I  worked  out;  but  one 
very  interesting  evidence  of  Dryden's  assiduous  kindness 
escaped  me.  In  1705  was  published  as  a  folio  pamphlet 
the  Ode  on  Mrs.  Arabella  Hunt  singing,  and  I  supposed 
that  this  was  the  original  appearance  of  this  pindaric, 
which  is  one  of  Congreve's  best.  But  my  attention  has 
been  arrested  by  observing  that  1705  was  the  year  in 
which  Arabella  Hunt  died,  and  also  that  so  early  as  1693 
Dryden  published  this  ode  in  his  Third  Miscellany.  The 
Arabella  Hunt  ode  therefore  belongs  to  the  beginning, 
and  not,  as  I  supposed,  to  the  close,  of  Congreve's  brief 
poetic  career.     It  is  a  beautiful  thing  : 

Let  all  be  hushed,  each  softest  motion  cease ; 
Be  every  loud  tempestuous  thought  at  peace; 
And  every  ruder  gasp  of  breath 
Be  calm,  as  in  the  arms  of  Death, 

and  ends  with  a  Keats-like  couplet : 

Wishing  forever  in  that  state  to  lie. 
For  ever  to  be  dying  so,  yet  never  die. 

It  is  now  plain  that  this  ode  was  published  as  a  book 
at  the  death  of  the  singer,  but  had  been  composed  at  least 
twelve  years  earlier.  Another  instance  of  Dryden's  con- 
nexion with  Congreve,  which  I  observed  too  late  to  record 
it,  is  the  fact  that  the  latter  contributed  a  song  to  the  Love 
Triumphant  of  the  former  in  1694.  In  the  dedication  of 
that  play  Dryden  speaks  of  "my  most  ingenious  friend, 
Mr.  Congreve,"  who  has  observed  "the  mechanic  unities  " 
of  time  and  space  strictly.  Love  Triumphant  was  Dry- 
den's last  play,  and  its  failure  was  complete.     A  spiteful 

81 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

lettor-wrilcr  of  the  tiiiK;  j^lorits  over  its  damnalion  because 
it  will  "vex  iuiiring  Dryden  and  Congreve  to  madness." 
All  this  confirms  the  idea  that  the  elder  poet's  com- 
plaisance in  tile  younger  was  matter  of  general  knowledge, 
and  Dryden 's  withdrawal  from  the  ungrateful  theatre  must 
have  been  a  blow  to  Congreve,  who,  however,  practically 
stepped  at  once  into  Dryden's  shoes. 

Another  biographical  crumb.  Charles  Hopkins,  one 
of  the  poet-sons  of  Ezekiel  Hopkins,  the  once-famous 
Bishop  of  Derry,  was  a  protege  of  Dryden,  and  in  1697 
brought  out  his  second  play,  Boadicea,  which  he  dedicated 
to  Congreve  in  a  long  poem,  from  which  we  learn  that 
Hopkins  was  an  intimate  friend  and  disciple  of  the  author 
of  The  Double  Dealer. 

You  taught  me  first  my  Genius  and  my  Power, 
Taught  me  to  know  my  own,  but  gave  me  more. 

He  praises  Congreve's  verses,  and  then  goes  on  to  say, 
in  lines  of  conspicuous  warmth  and  sincerity  : 

Nor  does  your  Verse  alone  our  Passions  move ; 

Beyond  the  Poet,  we  the  Person  love. 

In  you,  and  almost  only  you,  we  find 

Sublimity  of  Wit  and  Candour  of  the  Mind. 

Both  have  their  Charms,  and  both  give  that  delight. 

'Tis  pity  that  you  should,  or  should  not  write. 

He  proceeds,  enthusiastically,  in  this  strain,  and  closes  at 
last  in  words  which  still  carry  a  melodious  echo  : 

Here  should  I,  not  to  tire  your  patience,  end, 
But  who  can  part  so  soon,  with  such  a  Friend? 
You  know  my  Soul,  like  yours,  without  design, 
You  know  me  yours,  and  I  too  know  you  mine. 
I  owe  you  all  I  am,  and  needs  must  mourn 
My  want  of  Power  to  make  you  some  return. 
Since  you  gave  all,  do  not  a  part  refuse. 
But  take  this  slender  Offering  of  the  Muse. 
Friendship,   from  servile  Interest  free,   secures 
My  Love,   sincerely,  and  entirely  yours. 

82 


A  Note  on  Congreve 

This  is  by  no  means  tlie  only  occasion  on  which 
Charles  Hopkins  proclaimed  his  gratitude  and  affection. 
As  early  as  1694  ^e  paid  a  tribute  of  friendship  to  Con- 
greve, who  wrote  a  prologue  to  Hopkins's  first  tragedy, 
Pyrrhus  King  of  Epirus  (1695).  I  think  we  may  presume 
that  it  was  owing  to  the  greater  poet's  influence  that 
Pyrrhus  was  put  on  the  stage,  for  Congreve  wrote  a  pro- 
logue, in  which  he  warmly  recommended  it,  saying  : 

"Tis  the  first  Flight  of  a  just-feather'd  Muse, 

adding,  to  the  audience  : 

Then  spare  the  Youth;  or  if  you'll  damn  the  Play, 
Let  him  but  first  have  his,  then  take  your  Day, 

words  which  Congreve  would  hardly  have  used  unless  he 
had  been  responsible  for  the  production. 

It  is  odd  that  Hopkins  should  speak  so  humbly  and 
Congreve  dwell  on  his  friend's  inexperience,  since  Hop- 
kins was  at  least  six  years  older  than  Congreve,  who  was 
now  twenty-seven  and  pretended  to  be  only  twenty-five. 
He  enjoyed  no  further  advantage  from  the  devoted  attach- 
ment of  Charles  Hopkins,  who  retired  immediately  to  his 
father's  home  in  Londonderry.  Already  he  felt  the  decay 
of  "a  weak  and  sickly  tenement,"  and  his  last  play, 
pathetically  entitled  Friendship  Improved  (1697),  was  sent 
to  London  from  Londonderry  w^ith  a  preface  that  bewailed 
his  broken  health.  According  to  Giles  Jacob,  he  was  "a 
martyr  to  the  cause  of  hard  drinking,  and  a  too  Passionate 
fondness  for  the  fair  Sex."  The  same  authority  says  that 
Hopkins  "was  ahvays  more  ready  to  serve  others  than 
mindful  of  his  own  Affairs,"  and  we  can  well  believe  it. 
An  hour  before  his  death,  which  took  place  in  1700, 
Charles  Hopkins,  "when  in  great  pain,"  wrote  a  last  copy 
of  verses,  which  have  been  preserved.  And  so  Congreve 
lost  this  most  faithful  henchman  at  the  very  moment  when 
his  own  last  and  perhaps  greatest  play,  The  Way  of  the 
World,  failed  on  the  stage,  and  when  he  was  most  in  need 
of  sympathy. 

83 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

Now  for  a  white  sheet  to  wrap  both  Congreve  and 
myself.  In  1888  I  took  credit,  and  not  unjustly,  for 
having  discovered  that  Congreve  prefixed  verses  to  the 
first  edition  of  a  little  rare  book  called  ReliqucB 
Gethiniancu,  which  were  never  reprinted  until  I  restored 
them,  and  that  these  were  entirely  different  from  those 
he  prefixed  to  the  third  edition  of  the  same  book  in  1703, 
the  latter  alone  having  been  always  since  reprinted  among 
Congreve's  verses.  Both  poems  are  conceived  in  a 
Donne-like  spirit  of  hyperbole.  Grace,  Lady  Gethin, 
about  whom  I  have  found  out  more  since  my  hije  of 
Congrevc  was  published,  was  a  young  Irish  lady.  Miss 
Norton,  who  married  an  Irish  baronet,  Sir  Richard 
Gethin,  and  died  at  the  age  of  twenty-one  in  1697.  She 
secured  a  wide  reputation  for  learning  and  piety,  and  she 
was  actually  buried  in  Westminster  Abbey.  Her  essays 
— with  mortuary  folding-plates,  again  in  the  spirit  of 
Donne— were  posthumously  published  and  produced  a 
favourable  sensation.  But  to  my  great  confusion  Leslie 
Stephen,  who  had  (marvellously)  studied  Lady  Gethin, 
pointed  out  to  me,  when  he  read  my  biography,  that  she 
was  a  fraud,  conscious  or  unconscious.  Her  so-called 
works  were  cribbed  out  of  several  seventeenth-century 
writers  of  morality,  but  particularly  out  of  Bacon.  She 
had  copied  them  into  her  commonplace  book,  doubtless 
without  guile.  My  dear  friend  and  master  grimly  re- 
marked, "  I  wonder  neither  you  nor  Congreve  spotted 
'  reading  makes  a  full  man  '  !  "  But  he  never  said  a  word 
in  print  about  our  negligence,  which  deepens  my  remorse. 
I  suspect  that  Congreve,  like  myself,  did  not  read  the 
ReliquicB  very  carefully,  but  it  is  strange  that  no  other 
of  Lady  Gethin's  numerous  contemporary  admirers  dis- 
covered the  mare's-nest. 

In  1888  I  was  not  able  to  describe  Congreve's  ode  on 
the  Taking  of  Namur  in  its  original  form,  but  since  then 
I  have  secured  a  copy  of  the  first  edition  of  1695.  The 
title  is  A  Pindarique  Ode,  Humbly  Offer'd  to  the  King, 
On  His  Taking  Nmnure.  By  Mr.  Congreve.  There  are 
many  differences  of  text,  shouting  that  the  poet  subjected 

84 


A  Note  on  Congreve 

the  poem  to  careful  revision.  In  this  first  form,  the  King, 
afterwards  spoken  of  as  "William,"  is  described  and 
addressed  as  "Nassaw";  perhaps  the  poet  was  advised 
that  His  Majesty  did  not  care  to  be  incessantly  reminded 
of  his  Dutch  origin.  Here  is  a  cancelled  passage, 
describing  the  horrors  of  the  attack  : 

Cataracts  of  Fire  Precipitate  are  driv'n 

On  their  Adventurous  Heads,  as  Ruin  rain'd  from  Heaven  .  .  . 

Echoes  each  scalding  step  resound. 
And  horrid  Flames,  bellowing  to  be  unbound, 
Tumble  with  hollow  rage  in  Cavern 'd  Ground. 

Perhaps  Congreve  thought  this  was  too  boisterous.  In 
the  Namurode  there  are  curious  reminiscences  of  the  battle 
of  the  angels  in  Paradise  Lost.  There  was  no  half-title  to 
this  folio,  let  collectors  take  notice. 

The  complete  neglect  which  has  overtaken  the  minor 
writings  of  Congreve  is  regrettable.  His  odes  and  pas- 
torals are  deformed  by  a  too-conscious  rhetoric,  and  his 
imagery  is  apt  to  be  what  is  called  "artificial,"  that  is 
to  say,  no  longer  in  fashion.  But  they  bear  evidence  of 
high  cultivation  and  an  elevated  sense  of  style.  When 
Dr.  Johnson  said  that  The  Mourning  Muse  of  Alexis 
(1695)  was  "a  despicable  effusion"  he  fell  into  the  sin 
of  over-statement.  I  admit  that  this  agony  of  regret  for 
the  death  of  good  Queen  Mary  II  may  not  have  been  very 
sincere,  and  that  the  imagery  is  often  vapid.  Yet  the 
poem  is  an  interesting  and  a  skilful  exercise  in  a  species 
of  art  which  has  its  place  in  the  evolution  of  our  literature. 
It  is  not  so  good  as  Marvell  would  have  made  it  earlier 
or  as  Collins  later.  But  in  1695  I  know  not  who  could 
have  done  it  better  except  Dry  den,  and  even  he,  if  more 
vigorous,  was  not  commonly  so  melodious.  That  Con- 
greve could  not  write  a  tolerable  song  I  frankly  admit. 
To  book-collectors,  however,  the  separate  minor  publica- 
tions of  our  poet  seem  to  offer  a  field  which  is  still  un- 
harvested.  With  Mr.  Wise's  new  discovery,  and  with 
the  posthumous   Letter  to    Viscount   Cohham,   there  are 

G  85 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

some  nine  or  ten  separate  publications,  besides  the  four 
(or  five,  with  The  Judgment  of  Paris  of  1701)  quarto  plays. 
When  to  these  we  add  the  controversial  pamphlets  and 
Squire  Trelooby,  in  its  two  forms  of  1704  and  1734,  we 
have  quite  an  interesting  little  body  of  first  editions  for 
the  bibliophile  to  expend  his  energy  in  collecting. 

Lovers  of  pleasure  will  think  small  beer  of  these 
desultory  annotations.  But  in  the  case  of  a  great 
dramatist  like  Congreve,  whose  career  is  very  imperfectly 
known  to  us,  I  hold  that  all  information  is  welcome,  even 
though  the  separate  details  of  it  seem  to  be  trivial.  I 
present  these  glimmerings  in  the  hope  that  they  may  not 
be  useless  to  the  future  editor  and  biographer,  whoever 
he  may  be,  whose  lamp  will  throw  my  taper  into  the  shade. 


86 


THE    FIRST    DRAFT    OF    SWINBURNE'S 
ANACrORIA 

NO  modern  poet  offers  a  more  interesting  field  for 
critical  examination  in  his  MSS.  than  Swinburne 
does,  and  in  perhaps  no  other  can  the  movement 
of  mind,  under  changes  of  mood,  be  so  accurately  followed. 
His  prose  MSS.  have  a  somewhat  heavy  uniformity,  from 
which  little  is  to  be  gathered,  but  the  aspect  of  his  written 
verse  is  so  diverse  as  to  be  almost  bewildering  in  its 
changes  of  form,  not  merely  from  one  group  of  years  to 
another,  but  even  in  the  effusions  of  a  single  day.  After 
long  consideration,  and  a  study  of  a  multitude  of  MSS. 
written  between  1857  ^"^^  IQOQ?  I  have  come  to  the  conclu- 
sion that  the  critical  value  of  Swinburne's  drafts  depends 
very  much  upon  the  spirit  in  which  he  happened  to  compose 
his  poems.  There  were  evidently  three  methods  in  his  use. 
Some  time  ago  there  turned  up  a  large  number  of  dramatic 
and  lyrical  exercises,  written  by  Swinburne  as  an  under- 
graduate. These  have  greatly  modified  our  conception  of 
his  early  work,  and  they  reveal  in  the  apparently  idle  youth 
an  amazing  persistence  m  self-apprenticeship  to  the  craft 
of  verse.  I  hope  to  find  leisure  on  a  future  occasion  to 
describe  these  interesting  and  voluminous  papers :  in  the 
meantime  I  only  mention  them  here,  in  order  to  point  out 
that  they  are  written,  with  curious  uniformity,  and  with 
very  few  corrections,  in  a  hard,  angular  handwriting  which 
Swinburne  presently  abandoned,  but  which  resembles  the 
formal  script  in  which  his  later  Putney  poems  appear  to  be 
composed. 

I  say  "appear  to  be,"  because  I  am  convinced,  and  my 
conviction  is  supported  by  the  evidence  of  those  who  lived 
with  him,  that  he  adopted  in  later  life  the  practice  of  com- 

87 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

posing  and  practically  finishing  his  poems  in  his  head 
before  he  put  anything  down  on  paper.  He  used  to  be 
heard  walking  up  and  down  his  room  at  The  Pines,  and 
then  pausing  awhile,  evidently  to  write  down  what  he  had 
polished  in  his  head.  This  accounts  for  the  "clean  "  look 
of  most  of  his  later  MSS.,  which  appear  to  be  first  drafts, 
and  yet  have  few  corrections.  What  we  now  discover  from 
the  undergraduate  AISS.  of  which  I  have  spoken  above  is 
that,  apparently,  he  adopted  in  early  youth  the  plan  to 
which  he  was  to  revert  in  old  age.  But  of  this  plan  there 
might  be  two  varieties;  Swinburne  might  work  up  his 
stanzas  to  perfection  in  his  brain  before  writing  anything, 
or  he  might  be  inspired  with  such  a  flow  of  language  that 
the  finished  poem  would  slip  smoothly  from  his  brain. 
Doubtless  there  was  something  of  both  these  in  his 
practice,  but  I  incline  to  think  the  former  by  far  the  most 
frequent.  From  neither  can  we  obtain  much  impression  of 
the  mechanism  of  his  invention. 

But  there  was  a  third  method,  of  which  I  am  about  to 
describe  a  peculiarly  interesting  example,  which  the  poet 
adopted  in  the  hey-dey  of  his  poetical  career.  Soon  after 
he  left  Oxford,  perhaps  in  i860,  his  handwriting  changed 
its  character ;  it  became  less  boyish,  but  more  crabbed  and 
careless.  I  think  that  the  weakness  of  his  wrist  may  have 
been  the  cause  of  this  alteration.  It  is  particularly  marked 
in  the  period  from  1862  to  1870.  His  later  writing  was 
emphatic  in  its  stiff  inelegance,  but  usually  legible ;  the 
script  of  his  middle  period  was,  at  its  best,  lax  and 
straggling,  at  its  worst  almost  indecipherable.  But  it 
varied  extravagantly,  so  much  so  that  it  is  often  difficult  to 
believe  that  the  same  pen,  and  still  more  that  the  same 
hour,  could  have  produced  such  violently  diverse  exhibi- 
tions. It  has  gradually  dawned  upon  me,  while  helping 
Mr.  Wise  to  disentangle  an  accumulation  of  rough  copies 
and  fragments,  that  the  cause  of  this  diversity  lay  in  the 
degree  of  excitement  which  Swinburne  put  into  the  act  of 
composition.  He  was  always  paroxysmal,  always  the 
victim  of  excruciating  intellectual  excitement  which 
descended   upon   him   like   the   beak  of  the   Promethean 

88 


The  First  Draft  of  Swinburne's  Anactoria 

vulture.  To  discover  the  points  at  which,  in  a  particular 
composition,  this  fury  of  inspiration  fell  upon  him,  is  to 
get  a  little  closer  to  the  secret  of  Swinburne's  astonish- 
ing virtuosity,  and  is  my  excuse  for  the  following 
observations. 

So  many  of  Swinburne's  MSS.  have  been  preserved, 
principally  in  the  newspaper  bundles  which  he  so  oddly 
carried  with  him,  without  ever  examining,  through  all  his 
peregrinations  from  Oxford  to  Putney,  that  it  is  particu- 
larly vexatious  that  those  which  we  could  least  afford  to 
spare,  those  of  his  blossoming  period  from  1861  to  1868, 
are  very  exiguously  represented.  No  scrap  of  The  Queen 
Mother  has  turned  up,  nor  of  the  published  form  of 
Rosamond  (an  undergraduate  sketch  of  this  play  remains). 
The  original  MS.  of  Chastelard  exists  only  in  a  few  frag- 
ments, the  MS.  sold  in  New  York  in  1913  being  a  clean 
copy  for  the  press.  According  to  the  evidence  of  George 
Meredith,  the  first  draft  of  Laus  Veneris  was  written  in  red 
ink;  the  existing  version,  though  containing  corrections 
and  cancelled  passages,  is  written  in  black  ink,  and  shows 
no  sign  of  the  frenzy  of  composition ;  it  is  evidently  a 
transcript.  Of  Poems  and  Ballads  no  general  MS.  exists, 
but  portions  of  the  "copy"  sent  to  the  printers  are  in 
various  collections.  Most  of  these  are  transcripts,  and 
show  no  sign  of  emotion  or  excitement.  Several  first 
drafts  of  Poems  and  Ballads,  however,  have  been  pre- 
served, and  of  these  the  most  remarkable  that  I  have 
examined  is  that  of  Anactoria,  of  which  I  will  now  give 
some  account. 

Swinburne's  first  drafts  offer  none  of  the  attractions 
which  collectors  of  autographs  commonly  desiderate. 
They  are  never  signed  and  rarely  headed.  That  of  the 
long  poem  afterwards  called  Anactoria  has  neither  a  title 
nor  the  Greek  epigraph  from  Sappho.  It  is  written,  or 
rather  wildly  scribbled,  on  both  sides  of  six  sheets  of  blue 
foolscap,  the  water-mark  of  one  of  which  is  1863,  doubtless 
the  date  of  the  composition  of  the  poem.  These  sheets 
were  thrown  away,  and  came  into  our  hands  in  a  great 
disorder  of  papers,  mostly  worthless,  which  left  The  Pines 

89 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

after  Watts-Dunton's  death.  As  we  turned  them  over,  in 
the  welter  of  manuscript,  my  eye  caught  the  line 

Lilies,  and   languor  of  the  Lesbian   air, 

and  I  realized  what  lay  before  us.  Scattered  through  the 
bundle,  five  sheets  were  identified,  but  unfortunately  one 
sheet  was  missing.  By  a  happy  chance,  this  also  turned 
up  in  another  parcel  three  years  later,  and  the  first  draft  is 
now,  I  believe,  complete,  although  one  passage  in  the 
published  poem,  as  I  shall  presently  show,  is  absent. 

The  text  begins  hi^h  up  on  the  first  sheet,  and  offers  no 
peculiarity  in  the  opening  eight  lines,  which,  with  the 
slight  exception  of  "Sting  "  instead  of  "Blind  "  in  line  2, 
are  identical  with  the  published  version  of  1866.  The 
handwriting  is  the  usual  script  of  Swinburne  in  the  6o's, 
crabbed,  but  plain  and  calm.  Suddenly,  with  line  7,  a  sort 
of  frenzy  takes  the  poet's  pen,  and  at  the  side  of  the  paper, 
in  lines  that  slope  more  and  more  rapidly  downwards,  and 
in  such  a  stumbling  and  trembling  hand  that  they  are  with 
great  difficulty  to  be  spelt  out,  are  interpolated  the  lines  : 

Severed  the  bones  that  bleach,  the  flesh  that  cleaves. 

And  let  our  sifted  ashes  drop  like  leaves. 

I  feel  thy  blood  against  my  blood;  my  pain 

Pains  thee,  and  lips  bruise  lips,  and  vein  stings  vein. 

Then,  in  very  small  clear  script,  opposite  this  outburst,  is 
written,  by  itself,  like  a  solo  on  a  flute  : 

Let  fruit  be  crushed  on  fruit,  let  flower  on  flower, 
Breast  kindle  breast  and  either  burn  one  hour. 

To  this  immediately  follows : 
In  her  high  place  in  Paphos, 

which  is  the  opening  of  line  64  in  the  published  version. 
But  the  first  draft  stops  here,  leaving  that  half-line  un- 
cancelled, and  proceeds  quietly,  in  a  large  hand, 

Saw  love,  a  burning  flame  from  crown  to  feet, 

90 


The  First  Draft  of  Swinburne's  Anactoria 

and  so  on  for  six  lines  which  are  now  to  be  found  in  the 
middle  of  the  poem.  Thereupon  follows  a  breathless  inter- 
lude of  six  couplets,  scribbled  with  extreme  violence  and 
so  curiously  interwoven  that  the  only  way  to  explain  their 
relation  is  to  quote  them  : 

I  would  my  love  could  slay  thee;  I  am  satiated 

With  seeing-  thee  live,  and  fain  would  have  thee  dead, 

Vex  thee  with  amorous  agonies,  and  shake 

Life  at  thy  lips,  and  leave  it  there  to  ache; 

Strain  out  thy  soul  with  pangs  too  soft  to  kill, 

Intolerable  interludes,  and  infinite  ill; 

I  would  earth  had  thy  body  as  fruit  to  eat, 

And  no  mouth  but  some  serpent's  found  thee  sweet. 

I  would  find  gjievous  ways  k)  have  thee  slain, 

Intense  device,  and  superflux  of  pain, 

Relapse  and  reluctation  of  the  breath. 

Dumb  tunes  and  shuddering-  semitones  of  death. 

If  this  passage  be  compared  with  the  published  text,  it 
will  be  observed  that  firstly,  there  are,  with  the  single 
alteration  of  "kill"  for  "slay,"  no  verbal  modifications 
whatever  :  and  that  secondly  the  couplets  are  shifted  about 
like  counters  in  a  game,  or  as  if  they  were  solid  objects 
which  might  be  put  here,  there,  or  anywhere  in  a  liquid 
setting.  The  first  draft  of  A  Song  of  Italy,  now  in  the 
possession  of  Mr.  Thos.  J.  Wise,  presents  the  same 
characteristics,  though  in  a  less  degree. 

We  are  still  on  the  opening  sheet  of  the  draft  of 
Anactoria,  and  it  now  presents  to  us,  quietly  and  con- 
scientiously written  in  the  middle  of  the  page  : 

For  I  beheld  in  sleep  the  light  that  is 
In  her  high  place  in  Paphos,  heard  the  kiss 
Of  body  and  soul  that  mix  with  eager  tears. 
And  laughter  stinging  thro'  the  eyes  and  ears, 

a  sort  of  tessera  evidently  left  there  to  be  fitted  in  whenever 
a  favourable  blank  presented  itself;  we  find  it,  without 
the  smallest  change  of  language,  fixed  in  the  middle  of  the 

91 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

poem.  It  is  noticeable  that  the  fragment  "In  her  high 
place  in  Paphos  "  is  now  utilized. 

A  storm  of  excitement  presently  ruffles  the  poet,  and  he 
turns  the  sheet  in  such  agitation  that  he  holds  it  upside- 
down.  Without  leading  up  to  it  in  any  way,  he  starts  a 
passage 

She  came  and  touched  me,  saying  "Who  doth  thee  wrong, 
Sappho?" 

which  closes  abruptly  with  lines  which  may  be  cited 
because  they  contain  several  of  the  very  rare  instances  in 
which  the  draft  slightly  differs  verbally  from  the  text  of 
1866: 

Ahi,  wilt  thou  slay  me  lest  I  kiss  thee  dead? 
"  Be  of  good  cheer,  wilt  thou  forget  ?  "  she  said  : 
"For  she  that  flies  shall  follow  for  thy  sake. 
For  she  shall  g-ive  thee  gifts  that  will  not  take, 
Shall  kiss  that  will  not  kiss  thee  "  (yea,  kiss  me) 
"When  7  would  not,  etc." 

We  presently  come  across  the  only  Couplet  in  the  whole 
poem  which  was  cancelled  in  the  first  draft,  and  yet  re- 
appears in  the  published  text.     This  is  : 

Bound  with  her  myrtles,  beaten  with  her  rods. 
The  young  men  and  the  maidens  and  the  gods, 

now  very  effectively  introduced  into  the  argument,  but  in 
the  first  draft  destroyed  with  a  whirling  movement  of  the 
pen,  so  that  it  looks  as  if  a  dust-storm  involved  it.  Written 
with  frenzied  violence,  almost  perpendicularly,  the  draft 
then  presents  a  couplet : 

Taught  the  sun  ways  to  travel,  woven  most  fine 
The  moonbeams,   shed   the  starbeams  forth  as  wine, 

for  which  a  place  is  now  found  immediately  before  the 
"Bound  with  her  myrtles"  couplet.  The  ecstasy  of  the 
poet  seems  to  have  suddenly  flagged  here,  and  there  follows 

92 


The  First  Draft  oi  Swinburne's  Anactoria 

immediately,  in  sedate  script,  with  even  lines,  the 
passage 

Alas,  that  neither  moon  nor  sun  nor  dew 

Nor  all  cold  things  can  purge  me  wholly  through. 

Assuage  me  nor  allay  me  nor  appease, 

Till  supreme  sleep  shall  bring  me  bloodless  ease. 

Till  time  wax  faint  in  all  his  periods, 

which  now  takes  its  place  near  the  very  close  of  the  poem. 
The  actual  closing  lines  are,  in  like  fashion,  appended  to 
the  third  page  of  the  draft.     They  read  as  follows  : 

Till  fate  undo  the  bondage  of  the  gods, 
And  lay  to  slake  the  unquenchable  desire 
Lethean  lotus  on  a  lip  of  fire, 
And  pour  around  and  over  and  under  me 
The  wake  of  the  insuperable  sea. 

There  was  evidently  on  the  poet's  part  no  original  inten- 
tion of  utilizing  these  lines  as  k  conclusion  to  the  poem. 
I  give  them  here  because  they  present  the  solitary  instance 
of  important  verbal  alteration  to  be  found  in  the  whole  text 
of  1866. 

It  would  baflfle  the  most  meticulous  investigation  to 
restore  the  innumerable  false  starts,  broken  lines,  and 
rejected  readings  which  underlie  the  text  of  the  Draft. 
There  is  no  question  here  of  Swinburne's  creating  or  polish- 
ing anything  in  his  mind,  the  whole  work  of  composition 
proceeds  on  the  paper  itself,  and  what  is  very  curious  is  the 
fact  that  nothing  of  any  merit  or  technical  beauty  seems, 
so  far  as  it  is  possible  to  decipher  the  cancelled  verses,  to 
be  lost.  As  soon  as  ever  the  expression  became  adequate 
the  line  was  left,  and  was  never  modified ;  as  long  as  it  was 
inadequate,  it  was  pitilessly  rejected,  and  the  verse  not 
passed  till  it  satisfied'the  ear  and  imagination  of  the  poet. 
What  is  interesting  is  that  this  work  was  carried  out  with 
the  pen,  and  not,  as  was  the  practice  in  Swinburne's  later 
years,  with  the  mind;  and  nothing  could  be  more  opposed 
to  the  popular  notion  of  Swinburne  as  the  inspired  im- 

93 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

provisatore  than  all  this  evidence  of  intense  laborious 
application  to  his  creative  task.  In  fact  the  more  the 
original  MSS.  of  Swinburne  are  examined,  the  more 
clearly  is  he  revealed  to  us  as  an  artist  equally  sedulous 
and  sensitive,  working  by  fits  and  starts,  in  gusts  of  over- 
whelming emotion,  but  always  sufficiently  master  of  him- 
self to  recognize,  with  finality,  when  the  exact  form  of 
expression  had  been  reached.  Having  recognized  it,  he 
did  not,  like  Tennyson,  Landor  and  other  poets,  fidget  any 
further  with  it,  but  left  it  verbally  permanent. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  draft  of  Anactoria  proves,  what 
we  might  have  suspected,  that  if  Swinburne  completed  his 
verbal  text  in  his  first  movement  of  laboured  inspiration, 
he  made  no  effort  then  to  build  up  his  poem.  It  may  be 
observed  that  Dolores  is  a  rosary  of  stanza-beads  on  an 
invisible  string;  in  other  words,  that  the  string  might  be 
broken,  the  beads  shaken  together,  and  the  stanzas 
arranged  in  an  entirely  new  sequence,  without  any  injury 
to  the  effect  of  the  poem.  In  other  cases,  and  these  some 
of  Swinburne's  finest  lyrics,  the  same  want  of  progression 
is  to  be  noted.  But  we  have  not  been  able  to  witness  the 
process  before,  nor  were  we  prepared  to  find  it  working  in 
a  poem  which  is  so  elegiacal  as  Anactoria.  Yet  the  evi- 
dence of  the  First  Draft  is  positive.  It  is  now  clear  that 
Swinburne  forged  his  brilliant  Dryden-like  couplets  as 
though  each  one  were  a  stanza,  and  practically  treated 
them  as  bits  of  mosaic  to  be  fitted,  in  cooler  blood,  into  a 
scheme  not  present  to  his  mind  when  his  inspiration  seized 
him. 

We  seetn,  therefore,  to  be  in  the  presence  of  a  curious 
phenomenon.  Whereas  in  the  case  of  most  poets  the 
general  outline  of  the  work  precedes  the  execution  of  it  in 
detail,  Swinburne  offers  us  the  paradox  of  an  execution 
carried  to  the  utmost  finish  before  the  act  of  evolution 
begins.  He  takes  a  bag-ful  of  couplets,  all  polished  to  the 
finest  point,  and — on  some  subsequent  occasion — he  builds 
these  up  into  a  poem  which  has  the  aspect  of  inevitable 
growth.  The  First  Draft  of  Anactoria,  which  I  have 
attempted  to  describe,  is  totally  unintelligible,  a  chaos  of 

94 


The  First  Draft  of  Swinburne's  Anactoria 

Rodin-like  fragments,  unless  we  accept  this  theory  of  the 
poet's  method. 

One  point  remains  to  be  stated.  The  published  text  of 
Anactoria  contains  304  lines.  Of  these  I  have  found, 
scattered  over  the  tract  of  delirious  manuscript,  270.  It  is 
curious  that  not  a  single  verse  should  have  been  added  by 
the  poet  when  he  came  to  distribute  and  arrange  his  cluster 
of  couplets,  the  solitary  accession  to  the  text  being  the  solid 
passage  of  34  lines  in  the  middle  of  the  poem,  beginning 

Or  say  what  God  above  all  g-ods  and  years 
With  offering  and  blood-sacrifice  of  tears. 

Of  this,  not  a  single  trace  is  to  be  found  in  the  Draft. 
My  first  supposition  was  that  the  sheet  containing  these 
lines  was  lost,  as  might  well  be  when  we  consider  the 
accidental  and  fortuitous  way  in  which  the  rest  was 
retrieved.  But  I  have  come  to  the  conclusion  that  this  is 
not  the  case.     The  text  in  the  Draft  stops  at  the  line 

The  mystery  of  the  cruelty  of  things 

without  any  sign  that  the  idea  of  the  impassive  harshness 
of  Fate  was  to  be  expanded.  The  34  lines  which  now 
follow  have,  moreover,  a  character  that  distinguishes  them 
from  the  rest  of  Anactoria,  with  which  they  are  not  quite 
in  keeping.  They  leave  the  individual  passion  of  Sappho 
entirely  out  of  sight,  and  they  are  instinct  with  an  order 
of  theological  ideas  which  occupied  Swinburne  in  1864 
and  1865,  when  he  was  writing  Atalanta  in  Calydon  and 
the  earliest  of  Songs  before  Sunrise.  They  are  on  a 
higher  philosophical  plane  than  the  melodious  ravings  of 
the  love-sick  poetess,  and  the  more  we  read  them,  the  more 
may  we  be  persuaded  that  they  are  an  after-thought. 


95 


THE    HOTEL    DE    RAMBOUILLET 

THE  fashion  of  the  moment,  whether  in  Hterature  or 
in  art,  whether  in  England  or  in  France,  favours 
what  is  rough,  vivid  and  undisciplined.  A  new 
generation  of  readers  welcomes  the  lyrical  effusions  of  the 
cowboy,  the  lumberman,  the  tramp,  and  even  the  apache. 
It  accepts  Bubu  de  Montparnasse  as  a  hero  and  does  not 
shrink  from  overhearing  the  confidences  of  a  burglar. 
There  is  no  reason  why  we  should  exercise  our  sarcasm 
over  these  naivetes  of  taste,  while  indeed,  as  social  beings, 
we  are  even  entitled  to  rejoice  at  them,  since,  in  the 
language  of  practical  sestheticism,  a  positive  always  in- 
volves a  negative.  If  this  age  dotes  on  the  dirtiness  of 
tramps,  it  is  because  every  one  of  us  is  obliged  to  be 
occupied  and  clean ;  and  if  the  apache  is  the  object  of  our 
poetry,  it  is  because,  in  our  extremely  settled,  confident 
and  comfortable  lives,  we  miss  the  excitement  of  being  in 
personal  danger.  But  let  the  delicate  social  balance  of 
our  existence  be  again  disturbed,  let  us  become  practically 
accustomed  to  starvation  and  outrage  and  murder,  and 
not  another  strophe  would  our  poets  address  to  the  drunken 
navvy  or  the  grimy  bathchair-man.  If  London  or  Paris 
were  to  burn,  if  only  for  a  fortnight,  literature  and  art 
would  hurry  back  to  the  study  of  princesses  and  to  the 
language  of  the  Golden  Age.^ 

No  more  striking  instance  of  this  oscillation  is  to  be 
found  in  history  than  is  afforded  by  France  at  the  open- 
ing of  the  seventeenth  century,  in  the  creation  of  what  is 
called  the  vie  de  salon.  This  movement,  the  most  civiliz- 
ing, the  most  refining  in  the  intellectual  life  of  France, 

»  I  leave  these  airy  words  of  prophecy  as  they  stood   in   1912  before 
the  cataclysm  !  (1922.) 

97 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

was  the  direct  outcome  of  the  convulsion  of  the  civil  wars 
It  was  the  ugliness,  the  wickedness,  the  brutality  of  the 
reigns  of  the  later  Valois  which  made  the  best  minds  of 
Paris  determine  to  be  gentle,  beautiful  and  delicate  under 
LouFs  XIII.  Forty  years  of  savage  rapine  had  laid  a 
severe  embargo  upon  civilization,  and  no  picture  of  France 
in  1625  can  be  complete  without  a  glance  at  the  back- 
ground of  1575.  In  that  half-century  of  administrative 
disorder,  in  the  bitter  and  distracted  state  of  country  life, 
the  population  had  lost  confidence  in  virtue,  and  had  be- 
come rude  and  dishonest.  One  of  the  Venetian  ambas- 
sadors, travelling  through  France,  declared  of  the  French- 
men whom  he  met,  that  "the  sight  of  blood  had  made 
them  cunning,  coarse  and  wild."  If  such  was  the  con- 
dition of  the  countryside,  the  towns  were  even  worse. 
There  resulted  from  the  misery  after  the  siege  of  Paris  a 
universal  weariness,  a  longing  for  tolerance  in  man  to 
man,  a  yearning  for  refinement  in  private  life,  for 
security,  for  cultivation,  for  repose  of  mind  and  body 
and  estate. 

That  Henri  IV  was  a  Protestant  has  led,  perhaps,  to 
some  injustice  being  done  to  his  memory  in  a  Catholic 
country.  But  he  deserved  well  of  France  in  this  critical 
moment.  Every  necessity  of  life  had  become  extrava- 
gantly dear,  every  branch  of  industry  depressed,  if  not 
extinct,  when  he  came  to  the  throne.  He  set  himself  to 
be  the  guardian  of  trade,  and  of  the  arts.  He  rebuilt 
cities,  and  a  contemporary  reported  of  him  that  "  no  sooner 
was  he  master  of  Paris,  than  the  streets  were  swarming 
with  masons."  The  shrewdness  of  Henri  IV  broke  down 
the  old  superstition,  of  which  Sully  made  himself  the 
obstinate  spokesman,  that  agriculture  was  the  only  source 
of  wealth  for  France.  The  King  persisted  in  encouraging 
the  manufactures  of  silk  and  linen ;  in  widening  the  circle 
of  commercial  interests;  in  teaching  Frenchmen  to  achieve 
wealth  and  honour  as  architects,  painters,  sculptors  and 
cabinet-makers.  The  prestige  of  the  military  nobles  grew 
less  and  less,  that  of  the  bourgeoisie  grew  more  and  more, 
while  between  them  a  new  class,   refined,   intelligent,   a 

98 


The  Hotel  de  Rambouillet 

little  timid  and  supple  in  their  professional  adroitness, 
that  nouvelle  aristocratie  de  robe,  of  which  M.  Lavisse  has 
spoken,  came  to  the  front  and  gave  its  tone  to  the  surface 
of  life. 

The  general  trend  of  the  best  thought,  at  the  beginning 
of  the  seventeenth  century,  was  towards  the  polishing  of 
society,  left  roughened  and  rusty  by  the  long  wars  of 
religion.  But  the  court  of  Henri  IV  was  too  coarse,  and 
too  little  in  sympathy  with  the  mental  aspirations  of  the 
age,  to  carry  out  this  design,  which  needed  other  influences 
than  those  which  could  emanate  from  Marie  de  Aledicis. 
Meanwhile,  the  great  importance  of  the  provincial  centres 
had  rapidly  declined,  and  it  was  Paris  that  gave  the  tone 
to  France.  This  then  was  the  moment  when  a  peculiarly 
Parisian  centre  was  needed,  independent  of  the  court,  yet 
in  political  sympathy  with  it,  a  centre  of  imagination  and 
intelligence  not  too  austere  in  its  morals,  not  too  pedantic 
in  its  judgments,  to  include  the  characteristic  minds  of 
the  age,  whatever  their  limitation  or  peculiarity;  and  yet 
definitely,  unflinchingly  and  for  a  sufficient  length  of  time, 
radiating  politeness  and  authority.  Such  a  Parisian 
centre  must  be  aristocratic,  yet  liberal  and  intelligent;  it 
must  lay  down  rules  of  conduct,  and  contrive  to  get  them 
obeyed;  it  must  be  recognized  and  haunted  by  the  first 
men  and  women  of  the  century ;  it  must  be  actuated  in 
equal  proportions  by  the  genius  of  discipline,  and  by 
that  of  easy  grace  and  accomplished  gallantry.  In  short, 
it  must  be  what  Providence  astonishingly  provided  for 
French  society  at  that  moment  of  its  sorest  need,  the  un- 
paralleled Hotel  de  Rambouillet,  with,  as  its  prophetess 
and  chatelaine,  one  of  the  most  charming  women  who  have 
ever  occupied  the  pen  of  the  memoir-maker. 

In  obserxnng  the  history  of  the  famous  Chambre  Bleue, 
it  cannot  but  strike  an  English  critic  how  far  more 
articulate  French  opinion  was  than  English  in  the  seven- 
teenth century.  Although,  as  we  shall  presently  see, 
documents  have  been  slow  In  forthcoming,  they  existed, 
and  still  exist,  in  profusion.  But  while  we  can  now  study, 
almost  from  day  to  day,  the  intrigues,  the  amusements  and 

99 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

the,  enthusiasms  of  the  group  in  the  Rue  Saint-Thomas, 
the  record  of  a  similar  salon  open  in  England  at  the  same 
epoch  is  still  shrouded  in  a  darkness  which  is  likely  never 
to  be  penetrated.  So  far  as  we  can  venture  to  judge  there 
must  have  been  many  points  of  likeness  between  the 
Marquise  de  Rambouillet  and  Lucy  Countess  of  Bedford. 
The  circle  of  the  friends  of  each  was  illustrious.  Donne 
was  a  greater  poet-divine  than  Cospeau  or  Godeau ;  our 
national  vanity  may  fairly  set  Daniel  and  Drayton  against 
Voiture  and  Chapelain,  while  even  Corneille  is  not  shamed 
by  being  balanced  by  Ben  Jonson.  The  coterie  of  the 
Countess  of  Bedford  may  probably  have  been  less 
wealthy,  less  sparkling,  more  provincial  than  that  of 
Madame  de  Rambouillet,  but  the  melancholy  thing  is 
that  we  lack  the  opportunity  of  comparing  them.  Save 
for  vague  allusions  in  the  poets,  and  for  a  dim  tradition 
of  politeness,  we  form  no  detailed  impression  of  the  feasts 
of  wit  at  Twickenham,  whereas  about  those  in  the  Rue 
Saint-Thomas  we  know  almost  as  much  as  heart  can  wish. 
In  the  communication  of  social  impressions  England 
stood  much  farther  behind  France  in  the  seventeenth  cen- 
tury than  the  individual  genius  of  her  writers  accounts 
for.  We  have,  however,  one  possible  recompense':  the 
field  of  irresponsible  conjecture  is  infinitely  wider  in  our 
island  chronicle.  In  France,  even  the  craziest  of  faddists 
could  not  hope  for  a  hearing  if  he  suggested  that  the 
tragedies  of  Pierre  Corneille  were  secretly  written  by 
Richelieu  in  his  lighter  moments. 

On  the  history  of  the  Hotel  de  Rambouillet  the  docu- 
ments which  survive  are  very  numerous,  and  probably 
have  not  yet  been  exhaustively  examined.  The  seven- 
teenth century  in  France  was  awake  to  the  importance  of 
its  own  immortality,  and  set  down  the  records  of  its  social 
and  literary  glory  with  complacency.  The  memorials  of 
the  Hotel  de  Rambouillet  to  be  found  scattered  over  the 
works  of  such  contemporaries  as  Segrais,  Pellisson  and 
Conrart  have  long  (been  known.  The  poems  and  corre- 
spondence of  Voiture,  of  course,  form  a  mine  of  treasure, 
which   was  first  competently   w-orked  by    Ubicini    in  his 

lOO 


The  Hotel  de  Rambouillet 

edition  of  Voiture's  works.  It  is  now  sifted  to  its  last  crumb 
of  gold  by  M.  limile  Magne  in  the  eloquent  and  learned 
volumes  which  he  has  just  published.  There  is  also,  and 
most  important  of  all,  Tallemant  des  Reaux,  of  whom  I 
shall  presently  speak  at  greater  length.  M.  Magne  and  M. 
Collas,  with  Voiture  and  Chapelain  respectively  in  their 
particular  thoughts,  have  turned  over  the  priceless  wealth 
of  MSS.  in  the  Archives  nationales.  It  is  probable  that 
we  now  possess,  thanks  to  the  researches  of  these  scholars, 
as  full  an  account  of  the  Hotel  de  Rambouillet  as  we  are 
likely  to  obtain.  It  may  be  pointed  out  that  these  exact 
records,  founded  upon  positive  documents,  show  the 
danger  of  such  hypotheses  as  not  a  few  previous 
historians  have  rashly  taken  up.  In  the  light  of  present 
knowledge,  it  is  necessary  to  use  not  merely  Roederer 
(1835),  but  even  the  more  accurate  Livet  (1870),  with 
caution. 

The  Hotel  existed,  as  a  centre  of  light  and  civility, 
for  nearly  seventy  years,  and  involved  the  whole  careers 
of  two  generations.  Its  history,  which  was  developed  by 
circumstances,  and  somev;hat  modified  in  its  course  by 
changes  of  taste,  found  no  chronicler  until  it  had  existed 
some  twenty  years.  That  preliminary  period,  from  the 
death  of  Henri  IV  to  the  arrival  of  Tallemant  and  Voiture, 
is  precisely  the  time  about  which  we  should  like  to  know 
most,  and  about  which  we  are  doomed  to  know  least. 
The  violent  close  of  the  reign,  in  a  last  wild  crime,  had, 
as  we  see  from  every  species  of  evidence,  brought  with 
it  a  longing  for  serenity  and  repose.  The  keynote  of  the 
best  society  became  a  cultivation  of  simplicity,  refinement, 
and  delicacy.  This  growth  of  a  new  spirit  was  identified 
with  the  Marquis  and  Marquise  of  Rambouillet,  but 
exactly  how  at  first  we  are  at  a  loss  to  tell,  and  even 
M.  Magne  is  silent.  A  careful  setting  side  by  side  of 
scattered  impressions  may  enable  us,  however,  while 
avoiding  these  hypotheses  of  which  we  have  given  warn- 
ing, to  form  some  idea  of  the  foundation  of  the  H6tel  and 
its  prestige. 

Charles    d'Angennes,    Marquis    of    Rambouillet    and 

H  lOl 


LTBT7A-RY 
XJNIVERSTTY  OV  r^ry. 

Q  4  XTT  A 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

Pisani,  who  has  given  its  title  to  the  celebrated  union  of 
hearts,  must  not  long-  detain  us,  for  the  excellent  reason 
that  not  much  is  recorded  about  him.  He  was  probably 
born  about  1577,  and  he  died  in  Paris  in  1652,  having 
become  blind  about  twelve  years  earlier.  His  eyesight 
was  very  peculiar;  perhaps  he  was  colour-blind.  On  this 
subject  he  was  sensitive,  and  tried  to  conceal  his  con- 
dition. On  one  occasion,  when  the  Due  de  Montausier, 
who  was  known  to  have  recently  ordered  a  gorgeous  scarlet 
costume,  appeared  at  the  Hotel  de  Rambouillet,  his  host 
called  out  "Ah!  Monsieur,  la  belle  escarlate  !  " — which 
was  unlucky,  because  the  Due  had  happened  to  call  in  a 
black  suit.  Tallemant  says  that  the  Marquis  "avait 
terriblement  d'esprit,  mais  un  peu  frondeur."  In  this  he 
doubtless  resembled  most  of  the  wits  of  that  age,  who 
liked  to  let  their  antagonists  feel  that  there  were  claws 
under  the  fur.  In  wit  his  wife,  with  her  sweet  considera- 
tion and  delicate  humorous  tact,  was  immeasurably  his 
superior;  it  was  she,  and  not  he,  who  gave  the  Hotel  its 
famous  amenity.  We  must  not  measure  this  in  all  things 
by  our  Standards.  About  1625  there  was  quite  an  inun- 
dation of  spiteful,  and  sometimes  obscene,  verse  in  France, 
and  this  has  to  be  taken  into  consideration  in  dealing  with 
the  salons.  The  H6tel  de  Rambouillet  kept  this  in  some 
check,  but  was  amply  aware  of  the  entertainment  to  be  got 
by  clothing  satire — what  Agrippa  d'Aubign^  called  la 
rnalplaisante  verite — in  smooth  and  well-turned  verse. 
The  Marquis  was  himself  a  versifier,  and  he  shared  to  the 
full  his  wife's  respect  for  letters. 

There  is  nothing,  however,  to  show  that  this  agree- 
able man  would  have  been  able,  by  his  unaided  talents, 
to  make  a  mark  upon  the  age  he  lived  in.  He  was  the 
satellite  of  an  infinitely  more  refulgent  luminary,  his 
extraordinary  wife.  If  there  is  such  a  thing  as  social 
genius,  on  the  same  lines  as  literary  or  artistic  genius, 
this  was  undoubtedly  possessed,  in  a  very  high  degree, 
by  Catherine  de  Vivonne,  Marquise  de  Rambouillet.  She 
was  born  at  Rome  in  1588;  half  an  Italian,  her  mother  was 
a  Roman  prince^  Julia  Savella;  and  w^hen,  long  after- 

102 


The  Hotel  de  Rambouillet 

wards,  the  Marquise  had  become  not  merely  French,  but 
almost  the  culture  of  France  incarnate,  she  loved  to  dwell 
on  her  Italian  parentage.  Tallemant  tells  us  that  she 
always  thought  the  Savelli  the  best  family  in  the  world; 
it  was  her  faith.  At  the  age  of  six,  she  became  a 
naturalized  French  citizen,  and  in  January,  1600,  being  in 
her  twelfth  year,  she  was  married  to  Charles  d'Angennes, 
who,  his  father  being  still  alive,  was  then  Vidame  du 
Mans.  Her  own  sober  and  stately  father,  the  Marquis 
de  Pisani,  was  just  dead.  He  had  left  Catherine  a  con- 
spicuous heiress.  In  later  years,  she  spoke  with  charac- 
teristic humour  of  the  way  in  which  she  was  intimidated, 
poor  child  of  twelve,  by  her  husband's  years,  since  he 
was  twenty-three,  and  she  said  that  she  had  never  become 
quite  used  to  feeling  grown-up  in  his  presence.  But  this 
was  her  whimsical  way  of  talking,  for  there  really  existed 
between  them  the  closest  and  most  intimate  affection. 
The  Marquis  and  the  Marquise  were  always  in  love  with 
one  another,  throughout  their  extended  married  life  of 
more  than  half  a  century ;  and  in  that  age  of  light  loves 
and  cynical  relationships,  even  baseless  ill-nature  never 
found  any  serious  charge  of  frivolity  to  bring  against  this 
gracious  lady. 

It  is  true  that  it  could  not  be  difficult  to  show  com- 
plaisance to  Catherine  de  Rambouillet.  She  was  never 
dull,  never  inattentive,  never  indiscreet.  We  hear  that 
she  had  an  extraordinary  native  gift  for  being  present 
when  she  was  wanted,  and  occupied  elsewhere  when  her 
company  would  have  been  inconvenient.  As  years  grew 
upon  her,  it  seems  as  though  this  instinct  for  pleasing 
became  a  little  too  emphatic.  Almost  the  only  fault  which 
any  chronicler  brings  against  her  is  that,  towards  the  end, 
she  was  not  critical  enough,  that  she  liked  too  many 
people,  that  her  individuality  melted  into  a  general  indul- 
gence. But  she  was  surrounded  by  petulant  poets  and 
snarling  courtiers,  and  that  this  mild  censure  of  her  should 
be  insinuated  is,  probably,  but  another  tribute  to  her  tact. 
She  was  like  Milton's  Lady;  not  indeed  "chained  up  in 
alabaster,"  but  serene,   open-eyed  and  gay  in  the  midst 

103 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

of  a  monstrous  rout  of  ambitions  and  vanities  which  often 
resembled  "stabled  wolves  or  tigers  at  their  prey."  One 
of  her  most  striking  characteristics  obviously  was  her 
power  of  ruling  a  society  from  its  centre  without  making 
her  rule  oppressive.  All  the  anecdotes  of  her  discipline 
in  her  salon  show  the  coolness  of  her  judgment  and  the 
velvet  strength  of  her  hand.  She  was  capable  of  strong 
dislike,  yet  with  an  Italian  faculty  for  concealing  it.  She 
hated  Louis  XIII  to  the  inmost  fibre  of  her  being,  for 
what  seemed  to  her  his  despicable  qualities,  yet  he  never 
discovered  it. 

Those  who  regard  Catherine  de  Rambouillet  as  one  of 
the  most  engaging  figures  of  Europe  in  the  seventeenth 
century,  must  regfet  that,  from  an  age  where  portrait- 
painting  was  so  largely  cultivated,  no  picture  of  her  has 
come  down  to  us.  All  we  know  is  that  she  was  beautiful 
and  tall ;  the  poets  compared  her  to  a  pine  tree.  It  was 
supposed  that  she  never  consented  to  sit  to  a  painter,  but 
M.  Magne  has  discovered  that  there  were  portraits. 
Scud^ry,  he  believes,  possessed  engravings  from  paintings 
by  Van  Mol  and  by  du  Cayer.  The  earlier  of  these, 
painted  in  1645,  represented  her  gazing  at  the  dead  body 
of  her  father.  These  works  of  art  appear  to  be  hopelessly 
lost.  We  are  thrown  back  on  the  written  "portraits,"  in 
the  alembicated  style  of  the  middle  of  the  century,  which 
adorn  a  host  of  novels  and  poems.  Of  these  the  fullest 
is  that  introduced  by  Madeleine  de  Scud^ry  into  the 
seventh  volume  of  her  huge  romance,  Le  Grand  Cyrus. 
M.  Emile  Magne,  confronted  with  the  "precious"  terms 
of  this  description,  and  the  vagueness  of  it,  loses  his 
temper  with  poor  Mile,  de  Scudery,  whom  he  calls  cette 
pecore.  It  is  true  that  the  physical  details  which  would 
interest  us  are  omitted,  but  it  is  hardly  true  to  say,  that 
"11  est  impossible  de  rien  demeler  au  griffonage  [de  Mile, 
de  Scudery],  sinon  que  Mme.  de  Rambouillet  etait  belle." 
This  is  not  quite  just,  and  to  avenge  the  great  Madeleine 
for  being  called  a  pecore,  I  will  quote,  what  M.  Magne 
surprisingly  omits,  part  of  the  character  of  Cl^omire,  the 
pseudonym  of  Mme.  de  Rambouillet  in  Cyrus: 

104 


The  Hotel  de  Rambouillet 

ShiC  is  tall  and  graceful.  The  delicacy  of  her  complexion 
is  beyond  expression.  The  eyes  of  Cldomire  are  so  admirably 
beautiful  that  no  painter  has  ever  been  able  to  do  justice  to 
them.     All  her  passions  are  in  subjection  to  her  good  sense. 

This  might  be  more  precise,  but  the  touch  about  the  eyes 
is  helpful.  Chapelain  celebrated  (in  1666,  just  after  her 
death) 

Cet  air,  cette  douceur,  cette  gr^ce,  ce  port, 
Ce  chef  d'oeuvre  admird  du  Midi  jusqu'au  Nord ; 

And  Tallemant,  always  the  best  reporter,  speaks  of  the 
permanent  beauty  of  her  complexion,  which  she  would 
never  consent  to  touch  artificially.  The  only  concession 
to  fashion  which  she  made  in  old  age  was  to  rouge  her 
lips,  which  had  turned  blue.  Tallemant  wished  she  would 
not  do  even  this.  When  she  was  very  old,  her  head 
shook  with  a  sort  of  palsy ;  this  was  attributed  to  her 
having  indulged  too  much  in  the  eating  of  pounded 
ambergris,  but  perhaps  a  more  obvious  reason  could  be 
found  for  so  natural  an  infirmity. 

In  an  age  so  troubled  and  so  turbulent  as  that  of 
Henri  IV,  public  attention  was  concentrated  in  wonder- 
ment on  the  serene  beatitude  of  the  Rambouillets.  "So 
rest,  for  ever  rest,  O  princely  pair  !  "  the  admiring  court 
might  be  conceived  as  saying  to  a  couple  so  dignified,  so 
calm  and  so  unaffected  in  their  attachment.  "Tout  le 
monde  admire  la  magnifique  entente,  h.  travers  leur  vie 
limpide,  du  Marquis  et  de  la  Marquise."  Their  limpid 
life — that  was  the  just  description  of  a  mode  of  conduct 
so  rare  in  that  age,  and  at  that  social  elevation,  as  to  be 
relatively  unique.  What  existences  the  reverse  of  limpid, 
lives  tortured  and  turbid  and  mud-stained,  do  memoir- 
writers  of  that  time,  the  Segrais  and  the  Tallemants,  reveal 
on  all  sides  of  them  !  Both  were  gifted,  and  each  was 
persuaded  of  the  excellence  of  learning  and  literature, 
although  in  talents  the  wife  considerably  surpassed  the 
husband.  Madame  de  Rambouillet  was  versed  in  several 
literatures.      She    spoke    Italian   and  Spanish,    the   two 

105 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

fashionable  languages  of  the  time,  to  perfection.  She 
loved  all  beautiful  objects,  and  not  one  of  the  fine  arts 
failed  to  find  eager  appreciation  from  her.  In  order  to 
enjoy  the  sources  of  poetic  distinction,  she  taught  herself 
Latin,  that  she  might  read  Virgil  in  the  original.  But  she 
soon  relaxed  these  studies,  which  might  easily  have  landed 
her  in  pedantry.  She  became  the  mother  of  seven 
children,  to  whose  bringing-up  she  gave  strict  attention. 
She  found  that  her  health,  although  her  constitution  was 
good,  needed  care.  Perhaps  she  gave  way,  a  little,  to  an 
amiable  Italian  indolence ;  at  all  events,  the  strenuousness 
which  her  early  years  had  threatened  subsided  into  a 
watchful,  hospitable,  humorous  and  memorable  hospi- 
tality. If  there  could  be  rank  maintained  in  such  matters, 
Madame  de  Rambouillet  would  probably  take  place  as 
the  most  admirable  hostess  in  history. 

But,  to  entertain,  a  house  was  needed.  The  old 
Marquis  de  Pisani  had  bought,  in  1599,  a  ramshackle 
dwelling,  close  to  the  Louvre,  in  the  Rue  Saint-Thomas, 
which  became,  at  his  death,  the  property  of  his  daughter. 
In  1604  when,  it  is  to  be  noted,  she  was  only  sixteen  years 
of  age,  she  pulled  it  down  and  built  the  famous  Hotel  on 
the  site. 

Young  as  she  was,  it  is  certain  that  the  Marquise  was 
herself  the  architect  of  the  Hotel  de  Rambouillet.  A 
professional  architect  had  been  called  in  to  rebuild  the 
house,  but  when  he  submitted  his  designs  to  her  they 
dissatisfied  her  by  their  conventionality.  Tallemant 
describes  them — a  saloon  on  one  side,  a  bedroom  on  the 
other,  a  staircase  in  the  middle,  nothing  could  be  more 
poor.  Moreover,  the  courtyard  was  pinched  in  extent  and 
irregular  in  shape.  One  evening,  after  she  had  been 
dreaming  over  the  drawings,  the  young  Marquise  called 
out  "Quick!  some  paper!  I  have  thought  of  what  I 
want !  "  She  had  been  trained  to  use  a  pencil,  and  she 
immediately  drew  out  an  elevation,  \vhich  the  builders 
followed  point  by  point.  Her  design  w^as  so  bold,  so 
original,  and  so  handsome,  that  the  house  made  a  sen- 
sation in  Paris.     The  Queen-Mother,  when  she  built  the 

106 


The  Hotel  de  Rambouillet 

Luxembourg,  sent  her  architects  to  study  the  Hotel  de 
Rambouillet  before  they  started  their  plans. 

In  all  this  matter  of  the  foundation  of  the  Hotel  and 
the  opening  of  the  famous  salon,  M.  Magne  has  made 
considerable  discoveries,  which  should  be  distinguished 
from  much  in  his  charming  books  in  which  he  has  had 
no  choice  but  to  follow  earlier  published  authorities.  He 
has  made  excellent  use  of  the  Inventaires  of  1652,  1666 
and  167 1,  to  which  attention  had,  however,  already  been 
drawn  by  M.  Charles  Sauze.  But  a  ground  plan  of  the 
Hotel  de  Rambouillet,  from  a  contemporary  map  of  Paris 
by  Gomboust,  is  less  known,  and  a  reproduction  of  this  is 
a  singular  aid  to  the  reader  of  M.  Magne's  Voiture.  We 
see  that  it  stood  actually  next  door  to  the  famous  Hotel 
de  Chevreuse,  in  comparison  with  which,  in  its  sparkling 
newness,  in  its  slated  turrets  and  its  charming  combina- 
tions of  pale  stone  and  salmon-coloured  brick,  it  seemed 
an  expression  of  the  new  age  in  a  triumphant  defiance  of 
the  old.  From  both  houses  could  be  seen,  just  across  the 
quiet  Rue  Saint-Thomas,  and  over  a  strip  of  waste  ground, 
the  massive  contour  of  the  Louvre;  a  great  garden,  on  the 
west  side,  stretched  away  behind  the  house,  down  to  the 
corner  of  the  Rue  de  Richelieu. 

M.  Magne  has  discovered  that  M.  and  Mme.  de 
Rambouillet  took  up  their  abode  in  their  new  house 
early  in  1607 ;  this  fixes  what  has  hitherto  been 
quite  vague,  the  commencement  of  the  Hotel  de  Ram- 
bouillet. But  the  Marquise  was  still  only  nineteen  years 
of  age,  and  it  would  be  a  mistake  to  suppose  that, 
precocious  as  people  were  in  those  days^  she  began 
at  once  to  exercise  her  celebrated  hospitality,  or  to  fill 
the  rooms  with  tapestry,  statues  and  men  of  wit.  This 
came  on  gradually  and  naturally,  without  any  violence  of 
forethought.  It  has  been  suggested  that  the  Marquise 
founded  her  salon,  or,  less  pompously,  began  to  gather 
congenial  friends  about  her,  in  1613.  It  is  difficult  to  say 
on  what  documents  this  exact  date  is  based.  Her  known 
aversion  from  Louis  XIII,  and  her  growing  preference  for 
receiving  her  friends  at  home  over  appearing  in  a  crowd 

107 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

at  court — both  of  them,  doubtless,  symptoms  of  her 
personal  delicacy,  which  shrank  from  th(»  suspicion  of 
roughness — were  probably  emphasized  after  the  murder 
of  Concini  in  1617,  when  the  great  nobles,  who  had  defied 
the  weak  regency  of  Marie  de  Medicis,  boldly  swept  back 
into  Paris.  Doubtless  this  was  the  time  when  Madame  de 
Rambouillet  began  to  practise  a  more  cloistered  virtue 
among  the  splendour  and  fragility  of  her  treasures,  and 
first  intimated  to  noble  and  elegant  friends,  who  were 
scandalized  by  the  rowdiness  of  the  Louvre,  that  here 
was  an  asylum  where  they  might  discuss  poetry  for 
hours  on  the  velvet  of  her  incrusted  couches,  or  walk,  in 
solemn  ranks,  among  the  parterres  of  her  exquisite  walled 
garden. 

The  character  of  pedantry  and  preciosity  which  the 
Hotel  afterwards  incurred,  is  not  to  be  traced  in  any  of 
its  original  features.  In  its  early  years  there  was  no 
atmosphere  of  "intellectual  beatitude  "  about  it.  But  that 
a  certain  intellectual  standard  was  set  up  from  the  very 
first  it  is  impossible  to  question.  From  the  compliments 
of  the  earliest  inmates  of  the  Hotel  to  the  eulogistic  epi- 
taphs which  were  scattered  on  the  hearse  of  the  Marquise, 
all  her  devotees  agree  in  celebrating  her  passionate  love 
of  literature.  Clumsy  phrases,  rude  expressions,  the 
coarseness  of  a  language  still  in  process  of  purification, 
were  a  positive  distress  to  her;  and  Tallemant  has  a  droll 
anecdote  about  the  agitation  into  which  she  was  thrown 
by  the  use  of  so  vulgar  a  word  as  "scurvy,"  teigneux,  in 
an  epigram  which  was  being  read  to  her.  With  these 
tendencies,  she  was  peculiarly  fitted  to  welcome  to  her 
intimacy  the  man  who  of  all  others  was  at  that  time  most 
occupied  with  the  task  of  correcting  and  clarifying  the 
French  language.  An  inevitable  attraction  must  have 
drawn  Malherbe  to  the  doors  of  the  Hotel  de 
Rambouillet. 

It  would  be  of  interest,  and  even  of  some  importance, 
if  we  could  discover  the  date  at  which  Malherbe  began  to 
frequent  the  Hotel  de  Rambouillet,  since  there  can  be  little 
doubt  that    it    was   to  him    that   it  owed   its   intellectual 


The  Hotel  de  Rambouillet 

direction.  Unfortunately,  this  is  not  easy  to  do.  The 
poet  Racan,  whose  invaluable  notes  and  anecdotes  were 
adopted  by  Tallemant  to  form  the  body  of  the  historiette 
on  Malherbe,  did  not  anticipate  how  grateful  posterity 
would  be  for  a  few  dates  sprinkled  here  and  there  over  his 
narrative.  But  the  fact  that  Tallemant  here  took  the  line, 
so  very  unusual  with  him,  of  adopting  somebody  else's  life 
of  one  of  his  heroes,  can  only  be  accounted  for  by  the 
double  supposition  that  Malherbe  could  not  be  omitted 
from  his  gallery,  and  yet  had  quitted  the  scene  too  early  for 
Tallemant  to  know  much  about  him  at  first  hand.  He 
must  indeed  have  arrived  at  the  Hotel  very  soon  after  its 
formation,  since  he  was  sixty-two  years  of  age  when  we 
suppose  it  to  have  begun,  and  in  1628  he  died.  The  Due 
de  Broglie  was  probably  right  when  he  conjectured  that 
Malherbe  was  practically  the  first,  and  as  long  as  he  lived 
the  foremost,  of  the  literary  clan  which  met  in  the  Chambre 
Bleue.  Racan,  who  accompanied  and  may  have  intro- 
duced the  elder  poet  to  the  Hotel  de  Rambouillet,  says  that 
it  was  "sur  les  vieux  jours  de  Malherbe  "  that  the  latter 
had  the  curious  conversation  about  the  proper  heroic 
name,  or  poetic  pseudonym,  which  ought  to  fix  all  future 
references  to  the  Marquise,  a  conversation  which  led  to  his 
writing  an  eclogue  in  which  he  calls  himself  M^lib^e  and 
his  disciple  Arcan.  I  quote  Tallemant,  who  is  quoting 
Racan  : 

"The  very  day  that  he  sketched  out  this  eclogue,  fearing* 
that  the  name  Arthenice  [Catherine]  if  it  were  used  of  two 
persons  [for  Racan  had  addressed  Catherine  Chabot  as 
Arthenice,  in  a  pastoral]  would  make  a  confusion  between 
those  two  persons,  Malherbe  passed  the  whole  afternoon  with 
Racan  turning  the  name  about.  All  they  could  make  of  it 
was  Arthenice,  Eracinte  and  Carintde.  The  first  of  those  they 
considered  the  prettiest,  but  as  Racan  was  using  this  also  in 
a  pastoral,  Malherbe  concluded  by  choosing  Rodante." 

UnFortunately  Madame  de  Rambouillet,  who  had  plenty 
of  humour,  declined  the  name  of  Rodante,  which  would 
better   have    adorned  a   mouse   than   a  great    lady,    and 

109 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

Malherbe  threw  his  consideration  for  Racan  to  Uie  winds. 
Madame  de  Rambouillet  became  for  him  and  remained 

Celle  pour  qui  je  fis  le  beau  nom  d'Arthx^nice, 
and  he  called  her 

Cette  jeune  berg-^re  h  qui  les  destinies 
Sembloient  avoir  donn^  mes  derniferes  ann^es. 

We  gather  that  the  sound  judgment  and  the  exquisite 
charm  of  Madame  de  Rambouillet  attracted  Malherbe  away 
from  the  other  salons  which  he  affected,  particularly  from 
those  of  the  Vicomtesse  d'Aulchy  and  of  Madame  des 
Loges.  It  was  the  latter  lady  whose  ears  the  grim  poet 
soundly  boxed  in  her  own  house  on  a  celebrated  occasion. 
He  was  a  formidable  guest  as  well  as  a  tyrant  in  literature. 

But  the  relations  of  Malherbe  with  Madame  de  Ram- 
bouillet during  the  last  ten  years  of  his  life  were  kept  on 
a  level  of  unruffled  dignity  on  the  one  side  and  on  the 
other.  It  is  evident  that  the  Marquise  was  predisposed  to 
accept  la  Doctrine  which  Malherbe,  with  so  splendid  a 
force  and  pride,  was  about  to  impose  upon  his  countrymen. 
No  man  of  letters  has  lived,  in  any  country,  who  was  more 
possessed  than  he  by  the  necessity  of  watching  over  the 
purity  of  language,  of  cultivating  in  prose  and  verse  a 
simple,  lucid,  and  logical  style,  of  removing  from  the 
surface  of  literature,  by  an  arrogant  discipline,  all  traces  of 
obscurity,  pomposity  and  looseness.  He  held  the  honour 
of  the  French  language  above  all  other  obligations,  and 
the  stories  of  his  sacrificing  questions  of  personal  interest, 
and  even  affection,  to  his  passion  for  correct  diction,  for  a 
noble  manner  of  writing  and  speaking,  are  eloquent  of  the 
austere  and  dry  genius  of  this  masterful  rather  than 
charming  poet,  who,  nevertheless,  had  so  profound  and  so 
lasting  an  influence  on  French  letters.  Such  a  man  as 
this,  fanatically  possessed  by  an  abstract  ambition,  needs 
the  sympathy  of  a  wise  and  beneficent  woman,  and  the 
old  Malherbe,  in  the  twilight  of  his  days,  found  such  an 
Egeria  in  Catherine  de  Rambouillet.     It  was  in  the  Hotel 

no 


The  Hotel  de  Rambouillet 

that  the  famous  discussions  on  the  value,  selection,  and 
meaning  of  words,  on  nobility  in  eloquence,  on  purity 
and  force  in  versification,  first  took  place,  and  the  heat 
from  them  radiated  through  France.  The  new  era  of 
style  found  its  cradle  in  the  Chambre  Bleue. 

But  what  was  this  Blue  Room,  this  mysterious  and 
azure  grot  in  which  the  genius  of  French  classic  poetry 
went  through  its  transformation  ?  There  was  not  much 
mystery  about  it.  It  was  a  room,  deep  in  the  magnificence 
of  the  Hotel,  where  the  Marquise  was  in  the  habit  of 
receiving  the  familiar  visits  of  her  best  friends.  The 
novelty  of  it  was  its  colour;  all  other  salons  in  Paris  being 
at  that  time  painted  red  or  drab.  Out  of  the  Blue  Room 
there  opened  a  more  secret  retreat,  her  cabinet  or  alcove, 
where  she  could  withdraw  from  all  companionship,  and 
spend  her  time  in  reading  or  meditating.  The  furniture 
of  the  whole  Hotel  de  Rambouillet  was  on  a  scale  of 
opulent  splendour,  but  the  rarity  of  the  objects  brought 
together  was  concentrated  in  the  cabinet,  which  was,  as 
M.  Magne  puts  it,  a  sort  of  altar  which  the  Marquise  raised 
to  herself.  Every  object  in  it  was  fragile,  brilliant,  and 
precious.  In  the  days  when  Malherbe  frequented  the 
Hotel,  it  is  probable  that  no  inner  room  existed.  Talle- 
mant  gives  us  the  very  odd  history  of  what  led  to  its 
formation.  The  Marquise  in  her  youth  was  active  and 
ready  to  expose  herself  to  the  weather,  but  about  1623  she 
began  to  be  threatened  by  an  incommodite,  which  made  her 
unable  to  bear  exposure  to  heat.  She  had  been  in  the  habit 
of  taking  long  walks  in  Paris,  but  one  summer's  day,  when 
the  sun  suddenly  came  out  while  she  was  strolling  at  La 
Cour-la-Reine,  on  the  Champs  Elys^es,  she  nearly  fainted, 
and  was  threatened  with  erysipelas.  The  following 
winter,  the  first  time  that  she  drew  up  her  chair  to  read  by 
the  fire,  the  same  phenomenon  came  on.  She  was  now 
divided  between  perishing  with  cold  or  suffering  miseries 
of  heat,  and  she  therefore  invented,  taking  the  idea  from 
the  Spanish  "  alcove,"  a  little  supplementary  room,  where 
she  could  sit  close  to  her  friends,  while  they  gathered 
round  the  hearth,  and  yet  not  be  smitten  by  the  flames.     In 

III 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

1656,  in  the  great  winter,  we  hear  of  her,  now  an  elderly 
woman,  lying  on  her  bed,  heaped  over  with  furs,  but  not 
daring  to  have  a  fire  in  sight. 

Her  energy  did  not  leave  her  because  of  this  disability. 
The  letter-writers  of  the  period  describe  her  extraordinary 
activity.  She  had  a  great  love  of  pretty  and  elaborate 
practical  jokes  which  were  in  the  taste  of  the  time.  Hers, 
however,  were  distinguished  by  the  fact  that  they  were 
never  indecent  and  never  ill-natured.  But  when  an  idea 
occurred  to  Madame  de  Rambouillet,  she  rested  not  until 
the  wild  scheme  was  accomplished.  Voiture  dnd  Talle- 
mant  are  full  of  instances  of  her  fertility.  One  instance 
out  of  many  was  the  passion  which  she  expended  in 
making  a  cascade  in  the  park  at  Rambouillet,  to  startle  a 
party  of  guests.  The  water  had  to  be  brought  up  from  the 
little  tarn  of  Montorgueil,  and  the  Marquise  superintended 
every  spade  and  every  pipe.  Carried  on  by  her  enthu- 
siastic presence,  a  team  of  workmen  laboured  night  and 
day  to  complete  the  prodigious  plaything,  conducting  their 
ingenious  hydraulics  by  the  flare  of  torches.  I  could  fill 
pages  with  the  proofs  of  her  gaiety,  her  ingenuity,  the 
amazing  freshness  and  vivacity  of  her  mind,  but  the  reader 
can  turn  to  the  original  sources  for  them.  It  may  be 
suggested  that,  while  the  various  independent  authorities 
really  confirm  the  legend  in  its  outline,  when  they  tell  the 
same  story,  it  will  generally  be  found  that  Tallemant  tells 
it  more  naturally  and  more  exactly  than  Segrais  or  Voiture. 
It  is  also  to  be  remembered  that  it  was  Tallemant  who 
observed  longest  and  most  closely,  and  brought  least 
suspicion  of  vanity  to  bear  on  his  relation.  There  is  a 
phrase  buried  somewhere  in  the  vast  tissue  of  the 
Historiettes  which  deserves  to  be  better  known.  Speak- 
ing incidentally  of  the  Marquise  de  Rambouillet,  Talle- 
mant betrays  that  she  was  really  the  source  of  all  his 
inspiration  :  "c'est  d'elle  que  je  tiens  la  plus  grande  et  la 
meilleure  partie  de  ce  que  j'ai  escrit  et  que  j'escriray  dans 
ce  livre."  This  gives  his  statements  their  peculiar 
authority  with  regard  to  that  Blue  Room,  which  he  else- 
where calls  "le  rendez-vous  de  ce  qu'il  y  avait  de  plus 

112 


The  Hotel  de  Rambouillet 

galant  a  la  Cour,  et  de  plus  joly  parmy  les  beaux-esprits 
du  si^cle."  He  quite  frequently  introduces  an  anecdote 
with  the  words  "J'ay  ouy  dire  k  Mme.  de  Rambouillet." 

It  would  therefore  be  ungrateful  to  speak  of  the  Hotel 
de  Rambouillet  without  paying  a  tribute  to  the  strange 
quality  of  Tallemant  des  Reaux.  French  criticism,  in 
applauding  his  industry,  has  hardly  done  justice  to  the 
talent,  almost  the  genius,  of  this  extraordinary  man.  With 
an  unrivalled  gift  of  observation,  he  combined  that  clear 
objective  sense  of  the  value  of  little  things,  which  is  so 
valuable  in  a  memoir-writer,  and  he  is  the  very  prince  of 
those  biographers  to  whom  nothing  regarding  the  subjects 
of  their  art  seems  common  or  unclean.  He  has  the  keen 
eye  for  detail  of  his  English  contemporary,  John  Aubrey, 
and  his  Historiettes  are  really,  in  the  sense  of  Aubrey, 
Minutes  of  Lives.  But  Tallemant  has  much  more  design 
in  his  work,  and  a  broader  sense  of  the  relation  of  moral 
and  intellectual  values.  Saint-Simon,  who  was  a  child 
when  Tallemant  died,  has  more  passion,  a  more  impetuous 
and  broader  sweep  of  style,  and  a  more  intelligent  appre- 
ciation of  the  scene  of  life.  It  was  not  for  Tallemant  des 
R^aux  to  paint  "des  grands  fresques  historiques."  He  is 
as  trivial  and  as  picturesque  as  Boswell,  as  crude  as  Pepys, 
and,  like  them  both,  he  is  completely  indifferent  to  what 
other  people  may  find  scandalous.  He  moved  in  the  best 
society,  and  he  was  of  it;  but  in  his  lifetime  no  one  seems 
to  have  paid  him  much  attention.  Voiture  was  often  in  the 
centre  of  the  stage  at  the  Hotel  de  Rambouillet,  and  what 
answered  in  those  days  to  limelight  followed  him  whenever 
he  made  one  of  his  brilliant  appearances;  Tallemant  was  a 
shadowy  super,  hanging  about  in  the  wings,  but  he  was 
always  there. 

He  had  the  best  right  in  the  world  to  be  there. 
Ged^on  Tallemant  was  a  close  kinsman  of  the  Marquis, 
whose  sister,  Marie  de  Rambouillet,  had  married  the  bio- 
grapher's father,  a  Huguenot  banker  of  Bordeaux,  head  of 
one  of  the  best  provincial  families  of  the  day.  Gideon  was 
born  at  La  Rochelle  in  1619,  and  was  therefore  thirty  years 
younger  than  his  cousin's  wife,  the  famous  chatelaine  of 

113 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

the  Hotel  de  Rambouillet,  whom  he  adored.'  When  he 
came  to  Paris,  about  1637,  her  coterie  was  already  at  its 
height,  but  he  was  immediately  admitted  to  it,  and  no 
doubt  began  no  less  immediately  to  ask  questions  and  to 
take  notes.  He  had  every  possible  opportunity ;  his 
brother  and  a  cousin  were  members  of  the  new  French 
Academy  :  his  father  was  a  Maecenas  to  Corneille  and 
others:  he  himself  married  (in  January,  1646)  his  cousin 
Elizabeth  de  Rambouillet,  a  union  which  made  him  the 
familiar  of  La  Fontaine  and  La  Sabli^re.  In  1650  he 
bought  the  chateau  and  estate  of  Plessis-Rideau,  in 
Touraine,  and  by  letters-patent  changed  the  name  to  Les 
R^aux,  which  he  then  adopted  as  a  surname.  Here  he 
entertained  his  lifelong  friends — ^the  associates  of  the 
H6tel,  and  other  men  of  high  professional  rank,  Patru, 
Ablancourt,  the  P^re  Rapin.  He  knew  absolutely  every- 
body ;  he  was  adorably  indiscreet ;  and  those  who  associated 
with  him  perceived  in  him  only  a  wonderful  talker 
(Maucroix  says  that  he  "racontait  aussy  bien  qu'homme  de 
France  "),  and  a  lover  of  poetry  who  started  writing  an 
CEdipe  before  Corneille.  What  few  of  them  knew  was  that 
this  obliging  friend  and  graceful  companion  was  putting 
down  in  an  immense  MS.  all  the  anecdotes,  all  the 
intrigues,  all  the  tricks  of  manner,  all  the  traits  of 
character,  of  the  multitude  of  his  polite  acquaintances.  He 
has  left  more  than  500  of  his  little  highly  finished  portraits 
of  people  he  knew,  and  he  knew  everyone  in  that  age  and 
place  worth  knowing. 

It  is  doubtful  at  what  particular  time  he  wrote  the 
Historiettes .  He  was  composing,  or  perhaps  revising,  part 
of  them  in  1657,  but  some  must  be  later,  and  many  may  be 
earlier  in  date  than  that;  it  is  probable  that  he  ceased 
writing  in  1665.  He  has  been  accused  of  being  a  spiteful 
chronicler  of  the  vices  of  the  great,  and  he  has  been 
charged  with  a  love  of  looseness.  But  his  own  description 
is  more  just:  "Je  pretends  dire  le  bien  et  le  mal,  sans 
dissimuler  la  v^rite^."     He  writes  with  an  air  of  humorous 

*  Much  fresh   light  on   his  career   was  thrown  by   M.   £mile  Magne 
in  his  Joyeuse  Jeunesse  de  Tallemant  des  Riaux,  1921. 

114 


The  Hotel  de  Rambouillet 

malice,  pleased  to  draw  the  cloak  off  the  limbs  of  hypocrisy, 
but  not  moved  by  any  strong  moral  indignation.  Like 
Pepys,  he  enjoyed  giving  a  disinterested  picture  of  the 
details  of  ordinary  private  life,  but  was  rather  more 
cynically  amused  by  them  than  scandalized.  He  wrote,  or 
at  least  intended  to  write,  Memoires  de  la  r^gence  d'Anne 
d'Autriche,  but  this  has  totally  disappeared,  and  we  need 
not  regret  it.  G^d^on  Tallemant  is  amply  immortalized  by 
the  Historiettes,  which  fill  ten  closely  printed  volumes  in 
the  excellent  edition  of  MM.  Monmerqu6  and  Paulin  of 
Paris.  They  are  like  the  work  of  some  brilliant  Dutch 
painter  of  sordid  interiors.  He  is  not  always  well  inspired. 
He  says  nothing  more  adequate  about  Pascal  than  that  he 
was  "ce  gargon  qui  inventa  une  machine  admirable  pour 
I'arithm^tique,"  but  Pascal  was  hardly  of  his  world.  In 
1685  Tallemant  became  a  Catholic,  converted  by  the  P^re 
Rapin,  and,  having  outlived  all  his  friends,  he  died, 
probably  in  November,  1692,  leaving  a  huge  MS.,  the 
principal  subject  of  which  is  an  analysis  of  the  society  that 
met  within  the  Hotel  de  Rambouillet. 

At  his  death  that  MS.  vanished,  "as  rare  things  will." 
It  turned  up  again  in  a  library  at  Montigny-Lencoup  in 
1803.  We  may  note,  as  a  curious  coincidence,  that  while 
the  publication  of  Evelyn's  Diary  dates  from  1818,  and 
while  the  deciphering  of  Pepys  began  in  1819,  it  was  in 
1820,  that  Chateaugiron  set  to  work  at  copying  out  the 
Historiettes,  which  were  not  published  until  1835.  Three 
of  the  most  important  MS.  memoirs  of  the  seventeenth 
century  were  thus  independently  examined  for  the  first 
time  at  practically  the  same  moment  of  the  nineteenth. 
Each  publication  was  an  event  in  literary  history. 

No  such  concealment,  no  such  late  discovery,  has 
marked  the  course  of  Voiture,  whose  letters  and  poems 
were  published  by  his  nephew  Pinchesne  in  1650,  only 
two  years  after  the  poet's  death.  In  this  remarkable 
miscellany,  which  has  been  incessantly  reprinted,  and 
which  forms  one  of  the  recognized  lesser  classics  of  France, 
we  find  ourselves  breathing  the  very  atmosphere  of  the 
Hotel  de  Rambouillet.     It  is,   indeed,  amusing  to  reflect 

"5 


Aspects  and   Impressions 

that,  for  fifteen  years  before  her  death,  the  Marquise  and 
all  her  circle  possessed,  and  shared  with  a  wide  public,  this 
elaborate  body  of  evidence  as  to  their  friendships,  their 
tastes,  and  their  amusements.  In  the  QLuvres  of  Voiture, 
reprinted  at  least  seventeen  times  during  the  lifetime  of  the 
Marquise,  the  world  at  large  was  admitted  to  the  conversa- 
tions of  the  Blue  Room,  and  it  eagerly  responded  to  the 
invitation.  There  was  something  about  the  supple  genius 
of  Voiture,  at  once  daring  and  discreet,  apparently  tearing 
every  veil  off  an  intimacy,  and  yet  in  fact  wrapping  it  in 
an  impenetrable  gauze  of  mystery,  which  made  him  the 
ideal  revealer  to  excite  and  baffle  curiosity,  so  that  though 
he  tells  so  much,  as  he  stands  at  the  top  of  the  stairs  of 
the  Hotel  and  takes  the  town  into  his  confidence,  yet  he 
leaves  plenty  of  things  untold,  to  be  whispered  into  the  ears 
of  posterity  by  Tallemant  and  Conrart. 

The  father  of  Voiture  was  a  shopkeeper  who  sold  wine 
at  the  sign  of  the  Chapeau  de  Roses  at  Amiens,  and  there 
his  son  Vincent  was  born  in  1595.  The  author  of 
Alcidalis  et  Zelide,  was  therefore  the  contemporary  of 
Herrick  and  of  George  Herbert.  If  the  last-mentioned  had 
not  rejected  "the  painted  pleasures  of  a  Court-life  "  for  the 
retirements  of  a  saint,  he  might  have  been  the  English 
Voiture,  with  his  charming  gifts  and  ingenious  graces. 
The  year  1626,  which  saw  Herbert  adopt  the  solemn 
vocation  of  a  priest,  is  probably  that  in  which  Voiture, 
introduced  by  Chardebonne,  took  up  his  station  for  the 
rest  of  his  life,  as  principal  literary  oracle  and  master  of 
the  gaieties  in  the  Hotel  de  Rambouillet.  His  father  was 
honestly  supplying  wine  to  the  Queen-Mother,  Marie  de 
M^dicis,  and  there  was  no  question  in  his  son's  case,  as  in 
that  of  some  others,  of  doubtful  or  partial  nobility. 
Vincent  Voiture  was  frankly  and  openly  a  bourgeois, 
admitted  into  that  strictly  guarded  aristocracy  because  of 
his  abundant  talents,  his  wit,  his  pleasantness,  his  delicious 
social  qualities,  and  also  because  it  was  part  of  the  scheme 
of  the  Marquise  de  Rambouillet  to  break  down  the  boredom 
of  the  exclusive  privilege  of  rank  for  its  own  sake. 

The  main  principle  of  the  Hotel  was  a  study  of  the  art 

116 


The  Hotel  de  Rambouillet 

of  how  to  behave.  The  rules  of  la  bienseance  were  strictly- 
laid  down  there,  after  close  discussion  among  persons  of 
light  and  leading.  There  was  a  strong  resistance  made  to 
the  roughness  of  the  country  noble,  to  the  awkwardness  of 
the  ordinary  citizen,  to  the  inky  fingers  of  the  pedant,  to 
the  slovenly  petticoat,  the  disordered  wig,  the  bespattered 
boot.  The  attention  of  both  sexes  was  persistently  called 
to  these  matters  of  behaviour  and  tenue,  which  had  an 
importance  at  that  date  which  we  may  easily,  in  our 
twentieth-century  intolerance,  ridicule  and  ignore.  We 
see  the  comic  side  of  this  extreme  solicitude  about  dress 
and  ceremony,  etiquette  and  behaviour,  in  such  a  book  as 
Fureti^re's  amusing  Roman  Boiirgeois  (1666),  but  we  may 
see  the  seriousness,  the  stately  value  of  it,  in  the  tragedies 
of  Corneille  and  the  maxims  of  La  Rochefoucauld.  The 
school  of  la  politesse  became  that  in  which  every  talent 
must  graduate,  however  grave  its  after-labours  were  to  be. 
Even  the  solemn  Baillet,  writing  the  life  of  no  less  dignified 
a  person  than  Descartes,  mentions  that  the  philosopher 
passed,  like  all  other  well-bred  lads,  "aux  promenades,  au 
jeu  et  aux  autres  divertissements  qui  font  I'occupation  des 
personnes  de  qualite  et  des  honnetes  gens  du  si^cle."  In 
this  school,  the  elegant  and  supple  Voiture,  impregnated 
with  the  literature  of  Amadis  de  Gaule,  and  with  the 
language  of  Spanish  chivalry,  intimidated  by  no  hyperbole 
of  compliment,  capable  alike  of  plunging  into  the  deep 
waters  and  of  swimming  safe  to  shore,  always  on  the  verge 
of  absurdity,  always  gliding  down  the  agreeable  side  of  it, 
persistent,  subtle,  entertaining,  extravagant — in  this  school 
Voiture  was  the  triumphant,  the  unmastered  master.  His 
best  letters,  his  best  sonnets,  show  him  to  have  been  able, 
at  his  most  vibrating  moments,  to  rise  out  of  this  element 
of  billets-doux  to  better  things.  He  is  of  all  composers  of 
society  verse  and  prose  the  lightest  and  the  swiftest,  and 
we  may  say  to  those  who  sneer  at  so  unique  a  talent  what 
Madame  de  Sevigne  said  of  them  in  her  day  :  "Tant  pis 
pour  ceux  qui  ne  I'entendent  pas  !  " 

If  one  literary  figure  is  more  closely  identified  with  the 
Hotel  de  Rambouillet  than  Voiture,  it  must  be  Chapelain. 
I  117 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

It  is  therefore  curious  (hat  while  M.  Magne  was  preparing 
his  picturesque  volumes  on  the  former,  M.  Collas  should 
be  independently  writing  the  earliest  biography  of  the 
latter.  These  coincidences  arc  odd,  but  we  are  accustomed 
to  them ;  they  show  that  a  subject  is  "  in  the  air."  When 
Chapelain  made  his  first  appearance  at  the  Hotel,  perhaps 
in  1635,  Voiture  had  long  been  installed  there.  They  fell 
out  at  first  sight,  like  dog  and  cat.  When  the  author  of 
the  Preface  de  I'Adone  stumbled  over  the  precious  floor, 
dressed  like  a  scarecrow,  in  hunting  boots  and  dirty  linen, 
and  made  his  clownish  obeisance  to  the  Marquise,  she 
shrank  a  little  from  him,  and  Voiture  broke  into  a  scream 
of  elfish  laughter.  Madame  de  Rambouillet  never  learned 
to  care  for  Chapelain,  and  when  he  made  clumsy  love  to 
Mile.  Paulet,  "the  lioness,"  the  Blue  Room  shook  with 
mirth.  But  when  Mile.  Julie  became  a  great  personage, 
and  especially  as  soon  as  the  Due  de  Montausier  introduced 
the  pure  cultivation  of  pedantry  into  the  Hotel,  the  strong 
character  of  Chapelain  asserted  itself,  while  the  death  of 
Voiture  left  him  unquestioned  in  authority.  Grotesque  as 
Chapelain  was,  he  had  a  wonderful  talent  for  adapting 
himself  to  circumstances,  and  his  conversation,  though 
massive  and  solemn,  had  charm,  which  even  his  enemies 
admitted  to  be  extraordinary.  Chapelain  was  never  on 
those  terms  of  petted  intimacy  with  his  host  and  hostess 
which  the  insinuating  Voiture  enjoyed,  but  he  conquered 
a  position  of  more  genuine  respect  and  esteem. 

But  to  follow  M.  Collas  and  M.  Magne  into  the  later 
years  of  the  Hotel,  when  Mile,  de  Rambouillet  gave  to  the 
Blue  Room  a  peculiar  air  of  her  own,  would  be  impossible 
for  us,  with  the  limited  space  at  our  command.  We  must 
not  go  further  than  1641,  the  year  in  which  was  produced 
the  celebrated  Guirlande  de  Julie.  After  this  point,  not 
merely  does  the  character  of  the  scene  change,  and  its  tone 
become  less  pleasing,  or  at  least  less  sympathetic,  but  for 
the  reviewer  the  abundance  of  trees  makes  the  wood  itself 
almost  invisible.  Here  we  may  point  to  an  example  of  the 
superabundance  of  French  material,  which  may  almost  con- 
sole us  for  the  comparative  dimness  and  bareness  of  the 

118 


The  Hotel  de  Rambouillet 

contemporary  English  landscape.  In  dealing  with  this 
crowded  age,  M.  Magne  and  M.  Collas  have  shown  a 
learned  adroitness  and  the  happy  logic  to  which  scholars 
of  their  race  are  trained.  Of  the  two,  M.  Magne  is  the 
more  vivacious,  as  befits  the  biographer  of  Voiture.  M. 
Collas  has  more  difficulty  in  reconciling  us  with  the  tedious 
and  pedantic  Chapelain,  who,  nevertheless,  as  the  founder 
of  modern  criticism  and  the  mainstay  of  the  infant 
Academic  Fran(;:aise,  deserved  to  find  a  biographer  at  last. 
The  worst  of  it  is  that  while  Voiture,  dancing-master  to 
the  Muses  if  you  will,  and  petit-maitre  in  excelsis,  is  at 
least  a  brisk  and  highly  diverting  personality,  poor  Chape- 
lain, the  typical  academician,  the  mediocre  poet,  the  spider 
at  the  heart  of  the  wide  intellectual  web  of  his  time,  is  not 
man  enough  to  awaken  our  vivid  sympathies.  Moreover, 
to  conclude  on  a  note  of  bathos,  M.  Collas  has  neglected 
to  append  an  index  to  his  vast  compendium  of  facts. 

We  must  therefore  refrain  from  entering  the  labyrinths 
of  the  later  preciosite,  amusing  as  they  are,  and  must  con- 
tinue to  concentrate  our  attention  on  the  clearness,  the 
sweetness,  the  purity  with  which  the  founder  of  the  Hotel, 
the  great  Madame  de  Rambouillet,  throughout  her  long 
life,  created  an  atmosphere  of  sympathy  and  unity  around 
her.  As  long  as  she  was  paramount  there,  and  until  the 
influence  of  her  daughter  and  her  daughter's  husband, 
together  with  her  own  languor,  pushed  her  a  little  into 
the  second  line,  gaiety  was  in  the  ascendant  at  the  famous 
Hotel.  It  is  needful  to  assure  ourselves  of  this,  because 
in  the  later  days  it  became  purely  intellectual,  and  dry  in 
its  priggishness.  M.  Magne,  it  is  true,  attributes  this 
change  not  so  much  to  the  pedantic  Latinism  of  the  Due 
de  Montausier,  and  the  hair-splitting  of  the  academicians, 
as  to  the  decay  produced  by  gaiety  itself.  In  an  ingenious 
passage  he  says  ; 

The  taste  for  badinage  perverted  in  Voiture  the  taste  for 
beauty.  Hh  g-enius  glittered,  quivered,  frisked  and  palpitated, 
and  the  smile  he  wore  was  ever  melting  into  irony.  To  depth 
he  deliberately  preferred  an  elegant  futility.  He  was  impreg- 
nated with  the  quality  to  which  the  age  had  given,  in  a  noble 

119 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

sense,  the  name  of  g-allanlry.  But,  in  reacting  everywhere 
against  vulgar  roughness,  the  very  excess  of  his  effort  landed 
him  at  last  in  preciosity. 

It  never  had  that  deplorable  effect  upon  Madame  de 
Rambotiillet  herself,  on  whose  charming  figure,  swaying 
like  a  young  pine-tree  of  the  forest,  we  must  fix  our  atten- 
tion, if  we  would  see  only  what  was  best  in  that  remarkable 
and  so  vividly  French  revival  of  civilization  which  took 
place  under  Louis  XIII.  Her  purity  of  conduct  was  com- 
bined with  no  uncouth  prudery.  She  refrained  from  judg- 
ing others  hardly,  but  she  preserved,  without  a  lapse,  her 
own  high  standard  of  behaviour.  She  had  a  lively  horror 
of  scandal,  and  desired  that  those  about  her,  if  they  could 
not  contrive  to  be  virtuous,  should  at  least  be  discreet.  It 
was  detestable  to  her  to  hear  the  gallants  of  the  court  boast- 
ing of  their  conquests.  She  said,  in  her  amusing  way, 
that  if  she  herself  could  ever  have  been  persuaded  to  leave 
the  path  of  propriety,  she  must  have  chosen  for  a  paramour 
some  unctuous  and  secret  prelate,  but  that  she  had  never 
discovered  one  whom  she  could  trust.  It  was  her  tempera- 
ment, both  of  heart  and  brain,  which  led  her  to  rejoice  in 
the  new  spirit  of  Malherbe,  whose  simple,  firm  and  lucid 
verses  responded,  after  a  revel  of  romanticism,  to  her 
classic  craving  for  harmony  and  dignity.  In  Racan's 
pastoral  poems,  she  welcomed  a  recovered  love  of  country 
pleasures,  and  the  graceful  convention  of  a  shepherd.  She 
liked  private  letters,  hitherto  so  pompous,  to  be  composed 
in  such  terms  that  one  seemed  to  hear  the  writer's  voice 
chatting  at  the  chimney-corner.  Richelieu,  although  M. 
JNIagne  denies  the  legend  of  his  Discours  sur  VAmour, 
used  to  come  to  the  Blue  Room  to  have  a  good  laugh  with 
its  delightful  occupant,  and  everyone  unbent  in  her  sweet 
and  easy  presence.  Tallemant  has  a  story  of  no  less  digni- 
fied a  personage  than  the  Cardinal  de  La  Valette  romping 
with  the  Rambouillet  children,  and  discovered  by  the 
Marquise  hiding  from  them  under  a  bed. 

The  close  of  the  life  of  this  marvellous  woman  was  a 
sad  one.     She  outlived  all  her  early  friends,  even  outlived 

1 20 


The  Hotel  de  Rambouillet 

the  prestige  of  her  own  Blue  Room.  Six  days  after  her 
death,  Robinet  composed  a  sort  of  funeral  ode  to  her 
memory,  closing  with  an  epitaph,  which,  as  it  is  little 
known,  may  be  given  here.  It  was  written  in  January, 
1666  : 

Ci  gist  la  divine  Arth^nice, 
Qui  fut  I'illustre  protectrice 
Des  Arts  que  les  neuf  Soeurs  inspirent  aux  humains. 
Rome  luy  donna  la  naissance; 
Elle  vint  rdtablir  en  France 
La  gloire  des  anciens  Romains. 
Sa  maison,  des  vertus  le  temple, 
Sett  aux  particuliersi  d'un  merveilleux   exemple, 
Et  pourrait  bien  instruire  encor  les  souverains. 

This  is  not  very  good  poetry,  but  it  would  be  difificult  to 
sum  up  more  neatly  the  services  of  Madame  de  Rambouillet 
to  France  and  to  civilization. 


J21 


MALHERBE    AND    THE    CLASSICAL 
REACTION  1 

IN  contemplating  the  chart  of  hterary  history  we  are 
confronted  by  phenomena  which  more  or  less  closely 
resemble  those  marked  on  the  geographical  map.  The 
surface  is  not  uniform,  but  diversified  by  ups  and  downs, 
of  the  feature  that  we  call  taste  or  fashion.  A  special 
interest  attaches  to  what  may  be  described  as  the  water- 
sheds of  literature,  the  periods  which  display  these  changes 
of  direction  in  thought  and  language.  I  propose  to  bring 
before  you  briefly  some  characteristics  of  one  of  the  most 
saliently  marked  of  all  these  points  of  alteration,  that 
which  led  irresistibly  and  imminently  to  the  classical 
school,  as  it  is  called,  in  France,  and  from  France  ulti- 
mately to  the  whole  of  Europe.  Before  doing  so,  I  must 
draw  your  attention  to  the  fact  that  while  most  of  us  are 
led  to  give  special  heed  to  movements  which  tend,  like  the 
Romantic  renaissance  of  poetry  in  England  two  centuries 
later,  to  the  emancipation  and  even  the  revolution  of 
literature,  that  of  which  I  am  about  to  speak  was  de- 
liberately introduced  in  the  interests  of  law  and  order,  and 
was  in  all  its  features  conservative,  and,  if  you  choose  to 
call  it  so,  retrogressive.  It  did  not  aim  at  enlarging  the 
field  of  expression,  but  at  enclosing  it  within  rules,  ex- 
cluding from  it  eccentricities  and  licentious  freaks,  and 
rendering  it  subservient  to  a  rigorous  discipline.  In  this 
University  of  Oxford,  where  the  practice  of  poetry  is  now 
conducted  with  so  much  ardour  and  with  such  audacity  of 
experiment,  you  may  or  may  not,  as  you  please,  see  any 
parallel  between  the  condition  of  France  in  1595  and  our 

1   Delivered  before  the  University  of   Oxford  as  the  Taylorian  Lecture 
for  1920. 

123 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

own  condition  to-day.  My  purpose  is,  with  your  leave, 
to  describe  the  former  without  criticizing  the  latter. 

The  sixteenth  century  had  been  a  period  of  great 
activity  in  the  literature  of  France,  where  the  interaction 
of  two  vast  forces,  the  Renaissance  and  the  Reformation, 
had  introduced  wholly  new  forms  of  expression  into  the 
language.  Prose  had  started  from  its  mediaeval  condi- 
tion into  full  modernity  in  Calvin,  and  then  in  Montaigne. 
In  poetry,  with  which  we  are  concerned  to-day,  there 
had  existed  since  1550  the  brilliant  and  feverish  army  of 
versifiers  who  accompanied  Ronsard,  "the  Prince  of 
Poets,"  and  claimed  with  him  to  have  created  out  of  the 
rude  elements  of  the  Middle  Ages  a  literary  art  which 
linked  modern  France  directly  with  ancient  Greece. 
While  England  was  still  languishing  under  the  early 
Tudors,  and  Italy  had  grown  weary  of  her  burst  of 
chivalrous  epic,  France  gave  the  world  the  spectacle  of 
a  society  palpitating  with  literary  ambition.  Ronsard's 
magnificent  audacity  had  conquered  for  poetry,  an  art 
which  had  hitherto  enjoyed  little  honour  in  France,  the 
foremost  position  in  the  world  of  mental  activity.  Verse, 
which  had  been  treated  as  a  butterfly  skipping  from 
flower  to  flower,  was  now  celebrated  by  the  P16iade  as 
a  temple,  as  a  sunrise,  as  the  apotheosis  of  the  intellect. 
Immensely  flattered  by  being  suddenly  lifted  to  the  status 
of  a  priesthood,  all  the  budding  versifiers  of  France,  who 
a  generation  earlier  would  have  withered  into  insignifi- 
cance, expanded  into  affluent  and  profuse  blossom.  By 
the  year  1560  it  was  "roses,  roses  ajl  the  way,"  but  the 
misfortune  was  that  the  flowers  were  foreign,  had  been 
transplanted  from  Greece  and  Rome  and  Italy,  and  were 
not  really  native  to  the  soil  of  France. 

During  the  next  generation,  under  conditions  with 
which  we  have  no  time  to  occupy  us  to-day,  there  was 
a  steady,  indeed  an  almost  precipitous  decline  in  the 
quality  of  French  verse.  If  we  turn  to  our  own  litera- 
ture of  half  a  century  later,  we  see  a  parallel  decline  in 
the  drama  down  from  Shakespeare  to  Shirley  and  the 
later  disciples  of  Ben  Jonson.       We  all  know  how  dis- 

124 


Malherbe  and  the  Classical  Reaction 

concerting  it  is  to  pass  from  the  sheer  beauty  of  the 
great  Elizabethans  to  the  broken  verse  and  the  mixture 
of  flatness  and  violence  of  the  lesser  poets  of  the  Common- 
wealth. But  in  France  the  decadence  had  been  still  more 
striking,  because  of  the  extremely  high  line  adopted  by 
Ronsard  and  Du  Bellay  in  their  prose  manifestos.  The 
doctrine  of  the  Pleiade  had  been  as  rigorous  and  lofty  as 
a  creed  in  literature  could  well  be,  and  it  rose  to  an  alto- 
gether higher  plane  than  was  dreamed  of  by  the  English 
critics  half  a  century  later.  No  dignity,  no  assurance 
of  high  and  pure  poetic  resolution  could  surpass  the 
apparent  aim  of  the  manifestos  of  1549.  Frenchmen,  it 
seemed,  had  nothing  to  do  but  follow  these  exalted  pre- 
cepts and  to  produce  the  most  wonderful  poetry  which  the 
world  had  seen  since  the  days  of  Pindar  and  Sappho.  We 
cannot  to-day  enter  into  the  question  why  these  high  hopes 
were  almost  immediately  shattered,  except  so  far  as  to 
suggest  that  excellent  principles  are  sometimes  insufficient 
to  produce  satisfactory  practice.  We  have  to  look  abruptly 
this  afternoon  into  the  conditions  of  French  poetry  in  the 
last  years  of  the  sixteenth  century,  and  to  realize  that  those 
conditions  had  brought  French  literature  to  a  point  where 
reform  was  useless  and  revolution  was  inevitable. 

There  was  no  slackening — and  I  ask  your  particular 
attention  to  this  fact — there  was  no  slackening  in  the  popu- 
larity of  the  poetic  art.  There  existed,  in  1595,  as  great 
a  crowd  of  versifiers  as  had  been  called  forth  fifty  years 
earlier  by  the  splendour  of  the  Pleiade.  A  feature  of 
poetic  history  which  is  worthy  of  our  notice  is  that  an 
extreme  abundance  of  poetical  composition  is  by  no  means 
necessarily  connected  with  the  wholesomeness  and  vigour 
of  the  art  at  that  moment.  There  was  a  crowd  of  poets 
in  France  during  the  reign  of  Henri  IV,  but  they  were 
distinguished  more  by  their  exuberance  and  their  eccen- 
tricity than  by  their  genms.  I  shall,  in  a  few  moments, 
endeavour  to  give  you  an  idea  of  their  character.  In  the 
meantime,  let  us  be  content  to  remark  that  the  exquisite 
ideals  of  the  Pleiade  had  degenerated  into  extravagant 
conventionality,  into  which  an  attempt  was  made  to  infuse 

125 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

life  by  a  spasmodic  display  of  verbal  fireworks.  The 
charm  of  sobriety,  of  simplicity,  was  wholly  disregarded, 
<ind  the  importance  of  logic  and  discipline  in  literature 
ignored  and  outraged.  The  earlier  theory,  a  very  dan- 
gerous one,  had  been  that  poetry  was  the  language  of  the 
gods  rather  than  of  men,  that  it  was  grandiloquentia,  an 
oracular  inspiration.  Being  above  mankind  in  its  origin, 
it  was  not  for  mortal  men  to  question  its  authority.  It 
possessed  a  celestial  freedom,  it  was  emancipated  from  all 
rules  save  what  it  laid  down  for  itself.  Let  us  see  what 
was  the  effect  of  this  arrogance. 

The  scope  of  imaginative  literature  as  practised  by  the 
Pleiade  had  been  curiously  narrow,  so  much  so  that  it  is 
difficult  to  distinguish  the  work  of  different  hands  except 
by  the  dexterity  of  the  technique.  The  odes  and  pas- 
torals of  the  lesser  masters  are  just  like  those  of  Ronsard, 
except  that  Ronsard  is  very  much  more  skilful.  But  by 
the  close  of  the  century  there  was  a  wide  divergence  be- 
tween the  various  poets  in  their  themes  and  their  points 
of  view.  Two  of  them  greatly  excelled  their  contem- 
poraries in  eminerice  and  popularity,  and  these  two  were 
as  unlike  each  other  in  substance  as  it  was  easy  for  them 
to  be.  The  elder  of  these  two  was  Salluste  du  Bartas,  a 
writer  whose  quartos  are  now  allowed  to  gather  dust  on 
the  shelves,  and  who,  when  he  died  in  1590,  was,  with  the 
exception  of  Tasso,  the  most  eminent  European  writer  of 
verse.  His  influence  on  English  poetry  in  the  next 
generation  was  immense.  Translations  of  his  works  by 
Joshua  Sylvester  and  others  had  begun  to  appear  before 
his  death,  and  were  extremely  popular.  Du  Bartas 
possessed  qualities  of  intellect  and  art  which  are  by  no 
means  to  be  despised,  but  his  taste  was  execrable.  He 
wished  to  create  a  national  religious  poetry  on  a  large 
scale,  and  he  has  been  called  the  "Milton  manque  de  la 
France."  Du  Bartas  is  all  relinquished  to  evangelical 
and  moral  exhortation,  and  his  immense  Les  Semaines, 
besides  being  one  of  the  longest,  is  the  most  unblushingly 
didactic  encyclopaedia  of  verse  that  was  ever  put  forth  as  a 
poem.     He  had  a  very  heavy  hand,  and  he  sowed  with  the 

126 


Malherbe  and  the  Classical  Reaction 

whole  sack.  Our  own  Bishop  Joseph  Hall  of  Norwich,  who 
called  him  "some  French  angel,  girt  with  bays,"  described 
Du  Bartas  as — 

The  g^lorious  Sallust,   moral,   true,   divine, 

Who,  all  inspired  with  a  holy  rage, 

Makes  Heaven  his  subject,  and  the  earth  his  stage. 

In  his  own  time  his  myriad  admirers  preferred  him  above 
"golden  Homer  and  great  Maro."  His  earnestness  and 
his  cleverness — among  other  things  he  was  the  first  man 
after  the  Renaissance  to  see  that  the  obsession  of  the 
heathen  gods  was  ridiculous  in  a  Christian  literature^his 
abundance  and  his  vehemence,  made  Du  Bartas  a  very 
formidable  figure  in  the  path  of  any  possible  reform. 

As  an  instance  of  the  violence  of  fancy  and  gaudy 
extravagance  of  language  which  had  become  prevalent 
with  the  decline  of  the  Pl^iade,  I  will  now  present  to  you 
what  I  select  as  a  favourable,  not  a  ridiculous,  example 
of  the  art  of  Du  Bartas.  He  wishes  to  paraphrase  the 
simple  statement  in  Genesis  that,  on  the  fourth  day,  God 
set  the  stars  in  the  firmament  of  heaven  to  give  light  upon 
the  earth.  This  is  how  he  does  it,  as  translated  by  Joshua 
Sylvester  : 

Even  as  a  peacock,   prickt  with  love's  desire. 
To  woo  his  mistress,  strutting  stately  by  her, 
Spreads  round  the  rich  pride  of  his  pompous  vail, 
His  azure  wings  and  starry-golden  tail. 
With  rattling  pinions  wheeling  still  about. 
The  more  to  set  his  beauteous  beauty  out,- — 
The  Firmament,  as  feeling  like  above. 
Displays  his  pomp,  pranceth  about  his  love. 
Spreads  his  blue  curtain,  mixt  with  golden  marks, 
Set  with  gilt  spangles,   sown  with  glistening  sparks. 
Sprinkled  with  eyes,  speckled  with  tapers  bright. 
Powdered  with  stars  streaming  with  glorious  light, 
To  inflame  the  Earth  the  more,  with  lover's  grace 
To  take  the  sweet  fruit  of  his  kind  embrace. 

Our  first  impression  of  such  a  passage  as  this  is  one  of 
admiration  of  its  colour  and  of  its  ingenuity.     It  is  more 

127 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

than  rich,  it  is  .sumptuous;  the  picture  of  the  wheeHng 
peacock  is  original  and  brilliantly  observed.  But  there 
commendation  must  cease.  What  could  be  meaner  or 
less  appropriate  than  to  compare  the  revolution  of  the 
starry  firmament  as  it  proceeded  from  its  Creator's  hands 
with  the  strut  of  a  conceited  bird  in  a  poultry-yard?  The 
works  of  Du  Bartas  are  stuffed  full  with  these  strained 
and  fantastic  similes,  his  surface  sparkles  with  the  glitter 
of  tinsel  and  pinchbeck.  At  every  turn  something 
majestic  reminds  him  of  an  embroidery,  of  a  false  jewel, 
of  something  picturesque  and  mean.  The  planets,  in 
their  unison,  are  like  the  nails  in  a  cart-wheel ;  when 
darkness  comes  on,  heaven  is  playing  at  blind  man's 
buflf;  the  retreat  of  the  armies  of  the  King  of  Assyria 
reminds  the  poet  of  a  gamekeeper  drawing  his  ferret.  He 
desires  the  snow  to  fall  that  it  may  "perriwig  with  wool 
the  bald-pate  woods."  All  is  extravagant  and  false,  all 
is  offensive  to  the  modestv  of  nature. 

Du  Bartas  is  stationed  at  the  left  wing  of  the  army  of 
poets.  The  right  is  held  by  Philippe  Desportes,  whose 
name  has  recently  been  made  familiar  to  us  by  Sir  Sidney 
Lee's  investigations  into  the  extraordinary  way  in  which 
his  works  were  pillaged  in  his  lifetime  by  our  Elizabethan 
sonneteers.  Even  Shakespeare  seems  to  have  read,  and 
possibly  imitated,  Desportes's  Amours  de  Diane.  The 
producer  in  vast  quantities  of  a  kind  of  work  which  is 
exactly  in  the  fashion  of  the  moment  is  sure  of  a  wide 
popular  welcome,  and  the  cleverness  of  Desportes  was 
to  see  that  after  the  death  of  Ronsard  French  taste  went 
back  on  the  severity  of  Du  Bellay's  classicism,  and  re- 
turned to  the  daintiness  and  artificial  symmetry  of  the 
Petrarchists.  It  has  been  said  that  to  the  Italians  of  the 
sixteenth  century  Petrarch  had  become  what  Homer  was  to 
the  Greeks  and  Virgil  to  the  Latins.  He  was  the  un- 
questioned leader,  the  unchallenged  exemplar.  This 
infatuation,  which  spread  through  Europe,  is  of  im- 
portance to  us  in  our  inquiry  to-day,  for  Petrarch  was 
really  the  worm,  the  crested  and  luminous  worm,  at  the 
root  of  sixteenth-century  poetry.     It  was  extremely  easy 

128 


Malherbe  and  the  Classical  Reaction 

to  imitate  the  amorous  conceits  of  the  Italian  imitators 
of  Petrarch,  and  of  these  imitators  in  France  by  far  the 
most  abundant,  skilful,  and  unwearying  was  Philippe 
Desportes,  to  whom  Petrarch's  ingenious  elocution  ap- 
peared, as  it  appeared  to  all  the  critics  of  Europe,  "pure 
beauty  itself."  By  the  close  of  the  century  it  was  no 
longer  the  greater  Italians,  such  as  Francesco  Molza, 
who  represented  at  its  height  the  victorious  heresy  of 
Petrarchism,  it  was  a  Frenchman,  of  whom  our  own  great 
lyrist.  Lodge,  in  his  Margarite  of  America  in  1596,  wrote  : 
"few  men  are  able  to  second  the  sweet  conceits  of 
Philippe  Desportes,  whose  poetical  writings  are  ordinarily 
in  everybody's  hand."  Desportes  exercised  over  the 
whole  of  Europe  an  authority  which  surpassed  that  of 
Tennyson  over  the  British  Empire  at  the  height  of  his 
reputation. 

Here,  then,  was  another  and  still  more  formidable 
lion  couched  at  the  gate  of  poetry  to  resist  all  possible 
reform.  The  career  of  Desportes  had  been  one  of 
unbroken  prosperity.  He  had  become,  without  an  effort, 
the  wealthiest  and  the  most  influential  person  of  letters 
of  his  time.  His  courtly  elegance  had  enabled  him  to 
be  all  things  to  all  men,  and  although  a  priest  of  un- 
blemished character,  he  had  attended  one  Valois  king  after 
another  without  betraying  his  inward  feelings  by  a  single 
moral  grimace.  He  had  found  no  difficulty  in  celebrating 
the  virtues  of  Henri  III,  and  the  anecdote  about  him  that 
is  best  known  is  that  he  had  been  rewarded  with  an  abbev 
for  the  homage  of  a  single  sonnet.  He  had  exaggerated 
all  the  tricks  of  his  predecessors  with  a  certain  sweetness 
and  brilliance  of  his  own,  which  had  fascinated  the  polite 
world.  The  best  that  can  be  said  of  Desportes  is  that  he 
was  an  artificer  of  excellent  skill,  who  manufactured 
metrical  jewellery  by  rearranging  certain  commonplaces, 
such  as  that  teeth  are  pearls,  that  lips  are  roses,  that 
cheeks  are  lilies,  that  hair  is  a  golden  network.  But  I 
will  give  you  his  own  statement  of  his  aim,  not  attempting 
to  paraphrase  his  remarkable  language.  Desportes  gives 
the  following  account  of  his  ambition  : 

129 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

1  desire  to  build  a  temi)lc  to  my  chaste  goddess.  My  eye 
shall  Ixi  the  lamp,  and  the  immortal  ilame  which  ceaselessly 
consumes  me  shall  serve  as  candle.  My  body  shall  be  the 
altar,  and  my  sighs  the  vows,  and  I  will  intone  the  service  in 
thousands  and  thousands  of  verses. 


What  a  ridiculous  confusion  cA  imagery  !  Here  we 
have  a  man  whose  body  is  an  altar,  and  whose  eye — one 
of  whose  eyes — is  a  lamp,  and  whose  passion  is  the  candle 
in  that  lamp,  and  whose  mouth  and  throat  are  detached 
from  his  body,  and  are  pei^orming  miracles  in  the 
vicinity.  This  is  to  take  Desportes  at  his  worst,  and  it 
is  only  fair  to  admit  that  the  reader  who  winnows  the 
vast  floor  of  his  work  will  find  some  grains  of  pure  gold 
left.  But  the  mass  of  these  sonnets  and  odes  and 
madrigals  is  extraordinarily  insipid  and  cold,  the  similes 
are  forced  and  grotesque,  and  everywhere  pedantry  takes 
the  place  of  passion.  When  there  is  beauty  it  is  artificial 
and  affected,  it  is  an  Alexandrine  beauty,  it  is  the  colour 
of  the  dying  dolphin. 

vSuch  was  the  poetry  which  occupied  the  taste  of  France 
at  the  close  of  the  sixteenth  century,  and  whether  its 
form  was  brief  and  amorous,  as  in  the  sonnets  of  Des- 
portes, or  long-winded  and  hortatory,  as  in  the  sacred 
epics  of  Du  Bartas,  it  was  uniformly  exaggerated, 
lifeless,  and  incorrect.  In  all  its  expressions  it  was 
characterized  by  an  abuse  of  language,  and  indeed,  in 
the  hands  of  the  poets  of  the  late  Valois  kings,  the  French 
tongue  was  hurrying  down  to  ruin.  One  curious  vice 
consisted  in  the  fabrication  of  new  phrases  and  freshly 
coined  composite  words.  Of  these  latter,  some  one  has 
counted  no  fewer  than  300  in  the  writings  of  Du  Bartas 
alone,  and  Professor  Paul  Morillot  has  observed  that  the 
licence  which  the  poets  of  that  age  indulged  in  has  been 
the  cause  of  subseciuent  poverty  in  that  direction,  French 
having  received  and  rejected  such  a  glut  of  new  and  use- 
less words  as  to  have  lost  all  appetite  for  additions  of 
vocabulary.  Another  vice  of  the  period  was  the  ceaseless 
cultivation,    in    season   and  out  of   season,    of   a   sort   of 

130 


Malherbe  and  the  Classical  Reaction 

antithetical  wit.  The  sincerity  of  Nature  was  offended  at 
every  turn  by  the  monstrous  cleverness  of  the  writer,  who 
evidently  was  thinking  far  more  about  himself  than  about 
his  subject.     Here  is  an  example  : 

Weep  on,  mine  eyes,  weep  much,  ye  have  seen  much, 
And  now  in  water  let  your  penance  be, 
Since  'twas  in  fire  that  you  committed  sin, 

and  so  on,  with  wearisome  iteration  of  the  hyperbole. 
We  w^ere  to  suffer  from  the  same  disease  fifty  years 
later,  when  a  great  English  poet,  capable  of  far  nobler 
things,  was  to  call  the  eyes  of  St.  Mary  Magdalene 

Two  walking-  baths,   two  weeping"  motions, 
Portable  and  compendious  oceans. 

An  excellent  grammarian,  M.  Ferdinand  Brunot,  has 
remarked  that  at  the  end  of  the  sixteenth  century  a  law- 
less individualism — and  in  this  term  he  sums  up  all  the 
component  parts  of  literature,  style,  grammar,  treatment, 
and  tone — had  set  in ;  that  everybody  had  become  a  law 
to  himself;  and  that  the  French  language  was  suffering 
from  the  incessant  disturbance  caused  by  "the  fantastic 
individuality  of  writers"  both  in  prose  and  verse. 

This  chaotic  state  of  things,  which  threatened  French 
literature  with  anarchy  and  French  logic  with  bankruptcy, 
was  brought  to  a  standstill  and  successfully  confronted 
by  the  energy  and  determination  of  a  single  person.  I 
recollect  no  other  instance  in  the  history  of  literature  in 
which  one  individual  has  contrived  to  stem  the  whole 
flood  of  national  taste.  Of  course,  an  instinct  of  French 
lucidity  and  reasonableness  must  have  been  ready  to 
respond  to  the  doctrine  of  the  new  critic,  yet  it  is  none 
the  less  certain  that  through  the  early  years  of  the 
struggle  there  remains  no  evidence  of  his  having  been 
supported  by  any  associate  opinion.  I  dare  say  you 
recollect  a  famous  Japanese  print  which  represents  a 
young  lady  standing  on  the  edge  of  a  cliff,  and  gazing 
calmly   out   to  sea   while   she   restrains   the   action   of   a 

131 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

great  plunging  horse  by  simply  holding  one  of  her  feet 
down  upon  the  reins.  In  the  same  way  the  runaway 
Pegasus  of  France  was  held,  and  was  reduced  to  discipline, 
by  the  almost  unparalleled  resolution  of  a  solitary  man. 
This  was  Francois  Malherbe,  whose  name,  but  perhaps 
very  little  else,  will  be  familiar  to  you.  I  hope  to  show 
you  that  this  poet,  by  the  clearness  of  his  vision  and  his 
rough  independence,  brought  about  a  revolution  in  litera- 
ture which  was  unparalleled.  He  cut  a  clear  stroke,  as 
with  a  hatchet,  between  the  sixteenth  century  and  all  that 
came  after  it  down  to  the  romantic  revival  at  the  beginning 
of  the  nineteenth  century,  and  he  did  this  by  sheer  force 
of  character.  Malherbe  was  not  a  great  poet,  but  he  was 
a  great  man,  and  he  is  worthy  of  our  close  consideration. 

Francois  Malherbe  was  a  Norman ;  there  is  a  hint  of 
the  family  having  come  from  Suffolk,  in  which  case  the 
name  may  have  been  Mallerby,  but  we  need  not  dwell  on 
that.  His  parents  were  Calvinists,  and  he  was  born  at 
Caen  in  1555.  This  was,  you  observe,  between  the  births 
of  Spenser  and  Shakespeare ;  and  Rabelais  was  just  dead. 
Cerv^antes  was  eight  years  old,  Lope  de  Vega  was  to  be 
born  seven  years  later.  We  ought  to  notice  these  dates : 
they  give  us  a  sense  of  what  was  preparing  in  Europe, 
and  what  was  passing  away ;  a  great  period  of  transition 
was  about  to  expand.  Until  he  was  thirty  years  of  age 
Malherbe  appears  to  have  taken  no  interest  whatever  in 
poetry;  he  was  a  soldier,  a  military  secretary,  a  man  of 
business.  Then  he  went  to  live  in  Provence,  where  he 
read  the  Italian  verse  fashionable  in  his  day,  and  began 
to  imitate  it.  The  kindest  and  most  enthusiastic  of  his 
later  disciples  told  Tallemant  that  Malherbe's  early  poems 
were  "pitiful."  We  can  judge  for  ourselves,  since  at  the 
age  of  thirty-two  he  published  a  paraphrase,  or  rather 
a  series  of  selections  from  Tansillo's  hagmne  di  San 
Pietro.  The  bad  poets  of  the  age  were  lachrymose  to  the 
last  degree.  Nothing  but  the  honour  of  addressing  you 
to-day  would  have  induced  me  to  read  these  "Tears  of 
St.  Peter."  I  have  done  so,  and  have  even  amused  my- 
self by  paraphrasing  some  of  them,  but  these  I  will  not 

132 


Malherbe  and  the  Classical  Reaction 

inflict  upon  you.  It  is  sufficient  to  assure  you  that  up 
to  the  age  of  forty  the  verses  of  Malherbe  were  not  merely, 
as  Racan  put  it,  pitiful,  but  marred  by  all  the  ridiculous 
faults  of  the  age.  After  all,  I  must  give  you  a  single 
example.  This  is  translated  literally  from  "The  Tears 
of  St.  Peter": 

Aurora,  in  one  hand,  forth  from  her  portals  led, 
Holds  out  a  vase  of  flowers,  all  languishing"  and  dead ; 
And  with  the  other  hand  empties  a  jar  of  tears ; 
While  throug-h  a  shadowy  veil,  woven  of  mist  and  storm, 
That  hides  her  g-olden  hair,   she  shows  in  mortal  form 
All  that  a  soul  can  feel  of  cruel  pains  and  fears. 

At  what  moment  Malherbe  observed  that  tliis  was  a 
detestable  way  of  writing,  and  conceived  the  project  of  a 
great  reversal  of  opinion,  \ve  do  not  know.  His  early  life, 
and  just  that  part  of  it  on  which  we  should  like  light  to 
be  thrown,  remains  impenetrably  obscure.  But  we  do 
know  that  when  he  arrived  in  Paris  he  had  formulated 
his  doctrine  and  laid  out  his  plan  of  campaign. 
At  Aix-en-Provence  he  had  been  admitted  to  the 
meetings  of  a  literary  society,  the  chief  ornament 
of  which  was  the  celebrated  orator  and  moralist 
Du  Vair,  who  ought  perhaps  to  be  considered  as  in  some 
directions  the  master  of  Malherbe.  The  ideas  of  Du  Vair 
have  been  traced  in  some  of  Malherbe's  verses,  and  the 
poet  afterwards  said,  in  his  dictatorial  way,  "There  is  no 
better  writer  in  our  language  than  M.  Du  Vair."  It  was 
probably  the  dignity  of  the  orator's  attitude  and  the 
severity  of  his  taste  in  rhetoric  which  encouraged  the  poet 
to  adopt  a  similar  lucidity  and  strenuousness  in  verse. 
The  two  men,  who  were  almost  exactly  of  the  same  age, 
may  perhaps  be  most  safely  looked  upon  as  parallel  re- 
formers, the  one  of  French  verse,  the  other  of  French 
prose. 

Few  things  would  be  more  interesting  to  us,  in  our 
present  mood,  than  to  know  how  Malherbe,  arriving  in 
Paris  at  the  mature  age  of  fifty,  set  about  his  revolution. 
J  ^33 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

He  found  the  polite  world  tired  of  frigid  conceits  and 
extravagant  sentimentality,  above  all  tired  of  the  licence 
of  the  poets  and  the  tricks  which  they  were  taking  with 
the  French  language.  There  was  undoubtedly  a  long- 
ing for  order  and  regularity,  such  as  invariably  follows 
a  period  of  revolutionary  lawlessness,  but  no  one  was 
giving  this  sentiment  a  voice.  What  was  wanted  after 
such  a  glut  of  ornament  and  exuberance  was  an  arbiter 
and  tyrant  of  taste  who  should  bring  poetry  rigidly  into 
line  with  decency,  plainness,  and  common  sense,  qualities 
which  had  long  been  thought  unnecessary  to,  and  even 
ridiculously  incompatible  with,  literature  of  a  high  order. 
All  this  we  may  divine,  but  what  is  very  difficult  to  under- 
stand is  the  mode  in  which  Malherbe  became  the  recognized 
tyrant  of  taste.  It  was  not  by  the  production,  and  still  less 
by  the  publication,  of  quantities  of  verse  composed  in 
accordance  with  his  own  new  doctrine.  Malherbe  had 
hesitated  long  in  the  retirement  of  the  country,  waiting 
to  be  summoned  to  Court.  Somehow,  although  he  had 
published  no  book  and  can  scarcely  have  been  known  to 
more  than  a  handful  of  persons,  he  had  a  few  powerful 
friends,  and  among  them,  strange  to  say,  three  poets  whose 
work  was  characteristic  of  everything  which  it  was  to  be 
Malherbe's  mission  to  destroy.  These  were  the  Cardinal 
Du  Perron,  Bertaut,  and  Vauquelin  de  la  Fresnaye.  They 
formed  the  van  of  the  poetical  army  of  the  moment,  and 
it  is  a  very  curious  thing  that  these  three  remarkable 
wri'ters,  each  of  whom  remained  faithful  to  the  tradition  of 
Ronsard,  should  have  welcomed  with  open  arms  the  rebel 
who  was  to  cover  Ronsard  with  ridicule.  With  a  divine 
simplicity,  they  opened  the  wicket  and  let  the  wolf  in 
among  the  sheep.  They  urged  the  King  to  invite  Mal- 
herbe to  Court,  and,  when  His  Majesty  delayed,  Malherbe 
very  characteristically  did  not  wait  for  a  summons.  He 
came  to  Paris  of  his  own  accord  in  1605,  was  presented 
to  Henri  IV,  and  composed  in  September  of  that  year  the 
long  ode  called  a  "Prayer  for  the  King  on  his  going  to 
Limoges."    This  is  the  earliest  expression  of  classical  verse 


in  the  French  language. 


134 


Malherbe  and  the  Classical  Reaction 

In  those  days  the  intelligent  favour  of  the  King  did 
more  for  a  reputation  than  a  dozen  glowing  reviews  in 
the  chief  newspapers  will  do  to-day.  We  must  give  credit 
to  Henri  IV  for  the  promptitude  with  which  he  perceived 
that  the  cold  new  poetry,  which  must  have  sounded  very 
strangely  on  his  ears  accustomed  to  the  lute  of  Desportes 
and  the  trumpet  of  Du  Bartas,  was  exactly  what  was 
wanted  in  France.  He  himself  had  laboured  to  bring  back 
to  this  country,  distracted  as  it  had  been  in  its  late  political 
disorders,  the  virtues  of  law,  logic,  and  discipline.  He 
recognized  in  this  grim,  middle-aged  Norman  gentleman 
the  same  desires,  but  directed  to  the  unity  and  order  of 
literature.  A  recent  French  historian  has  pointed  out  that 
"the  very  nature  of  Malherbe's  talent,  its  haughty,  solemn, 
and  majestic  tone,  rendered  him  peculiarly  fitted  to  become 
the  official  and,  as  it  were,  the  impersonal  singer  of  the 
King's  great  exploits,  and  to  engrave  in  letters  of  brass, 
as  on  a  triumphal  monument,  the  expression  of  public 
gratitude  and  admiration."  Malherbe,  as  has  been  said, 
was  appointed  "the  official  poet  of  the  Bourbon  dynasty." 

The  precious  correspondence  with  his  Proven9al  friend 
Peiresc,  which  Malherbe  kept  up  from  1606  till  his  death 
in  1628,  a  correspondence  which  was  still  unknown  a 
hundred  years  ago,  throws  a  good  deal  of  light  upon  the 
final  years  of  the  poet,  and  in  particular  on  the  favour 
with  which  he  was  entertained  at  Court.  There  are  more 
than  200  of  these  letters,  which  nevertheless,  like  most  such 
collections  of  that  age,  succeed  in  concealing  from  us  the 
very  facts  which  we  are  most  anxious  to  hear  about.  Thus, 
while  Malherbe  expatiates  to  Peiresc  about  queens  and 
princes,  he  tells  us  nothing,  or  next  to  nothing,  about  the 
literary  life  in  which  we  know  that  he  made  so  disconcert- 
ing a  figure.  But  that  most  enchanting  of  gossips,  Talle- 
mant  des  R^aux,  has  preserved  for  us  an  anecdote  of  a 
highly  illuminating  nature.  We  have  seen  that  the 
supremacy  in  French  poetry  had  been  held  for  many  years 
by  Philippe  Desportes,  who  was  now  approaching  the 
close  of  a  long  life  of  sumptuous  success.  It  could  not  be 
a  matter  of  indifference  to  the  last  and  most  magnificent  of 

135 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

the  Ronsardists  that  an  upstart,  till  now  unheard  of,  should 
suddenly  be  welcomed  at  Court.  He  desired  his  nephew, 
Mathurin  Regnier — himself  a  man  of  genius,  but  not  in 
our  picture  to-day — he  desired  R(^'gnier  to  bring  this 
M.  de  Malherbc  to  dinner.  They  arrived,  but  were  late, 
and  dinner  stood  already  on  the  table.  The  old  Desportes 
received  Malherbe  with  all  the  politeness  conceivable,  and 
said  that  he  wished  to  give  him  a  copy  of  the  new  edition 
of  his  Psalms,  in  which  he  had  made  many  corrections 
and  additions.  Such  a  compliment  from  the  acknowledged 
head  of  French  poetry  was  extreme,  but  Malherbe  had 
already  made  up  his  mind  to  bring  down  the  reputation 
of  Desportes  with  a  crash,  as  Samson  destroyed  the  gates 
of  Dagon  in  Gaza.  Desportes  was  starting  to  go  upstairs 
to  fetch  the  book,  when  Malherbe  in  rough  country  fashion 
(rustiquement)  told  him  he  had  seen  it  already,  that  it  was 
not  worth  while  to  let  his  soup  grow  cold,  for  it  was  likely 
to  be  better  than  his  Psalms  were.  Upon  this  they  sat 
down  to  dinner  at  once,  but  Malherbe  said  nothing  more, 
and  when  dinner  was  done  he  went  away,  leaving  the  host 
heart-broken  and  young  Regnier  furious.  This  must  have 
been  very  soon  after  Malherbe's  arrival  in  Paris,  for 
Desportes  died  in  1606. 

All  that  has  been  recorded  of  the  manners  and  con- 
versation of  Malherbe  tends  to  explain  this  story.  He 
could  be  courtly  and  even  magnificent,  and  he  had  a  bluff 
kind  of  concentrated  politeness,  when  he  chose  to  exercise 
it,  which  was  much  appreciated  by  the  royal  family.  He 
was  a  tall,  handsome  man,  with  keen  eyes,  authoritative 
and  even  domineering,  generally  silent  in  society,  but 
ready  to  break  in  with  a  brusque  contradiction  of  what 
somebody  else  was  saying.  He  was  a  scorner  of  human 
frailty,  believing  himself  to  be  above  the  reach  of  all 
emotional  weakness.  The  violent  force,  which  burned 
arrogantly  in  his  spirit,  comes  out  in  everything  which  is 
preserved  about  him,  in  his  verses,  in  his  letters,  in  the 
anecdotes  of  friends  and  enemies.  His  retorts  were  like 
those  of  Dr.  Samuel  Johnson,  but  without  the  healing 
balsam    of    Johnson's    tenderness.     There    was    nothing 

136 


Malherbe  and  the  Classical  Reaction 

tender  about  Malherbe,  and  we  may  admit  that  he  could 
not  have  carried  out  his  work  if  there  had  been.  His  in- 
tellectual conscience  was  implacable ;  he  allowed  nothing 
in  the  world  to  come  between  him  and  his  inexorable 
doctrine.  When  he  learned  that  the  Vicomtcsse  d'Auchy 
(Charlotte  des  Ursins),  the  "Caliste"  of  his  own  verses, 
had  been  encouraging  a  poet  of  the  old  school,  he  went  to 
her  house,  pushed  into  her  bedroom,  and  slapped  her  face 
as  she  lay  upon  her  bed. 

Tallemant  tells  us  that  "meditation  and  art  made  a 
poet  "  of  Malherbe,  non  nascitur  sed  fit.  At  no  time  did 
he  learn  to  write  with  ease,  and  after  so  many  vears  spent 
in  the  passionate  cultivation  of  the  Muse,  his  poetical 
writings  are  contained  in  as  narrow  a  compass  as  those  of 
Gray,  who  confessed  that  his  "works  "  were  so  small  that 
they  might  be  mistaken  for  those  of  a  pismire.  Malherbe 
had  long  pauses  during  which  he  seemed  to  do  nothing  at 
all  except  meditate  and  lay  down  the  law.  Balzac,  who 
was  one  of  those  young  men  in  whose  company  he 
delighted,  declares  that  whenever  Malherbe  had  written  a 
thousand  verses  he  rested  for  ten  years.  All  this  was  part 
of  a  studied  frugality.  The  Ronsardists  and  their 
followers  had  been  lavish  in  everything;  they  had  poured 
out  floods  of  slack  verse,  loose  in  construction,  faulty  in 
grammar.  If  a  slight  difficulty  presented  itself  to  them, 
they  evaded  it,  they  leaped  over  it.  Having  no  reverence 
for  the  French  language,  they  invented  hideous  and  reck- 
less words,  they  stretched  or  curtailed  syllables,  in  order  to 
fit  the  scansion.  There  is  recorded  a  saying  of  Malherbe 
which  is  infinitely  characteristic.  When  he  was  asked 
what,  in  fact,  was  his  object  in  all  he  was  doing,  he  replied 
that  he  proposed  "to  rescue  French  poetry  from  the  hands 
of  the  little  monsters  who  were  dishonouring  it."  The 
glorious  Desportes,  the  sublime  Du  Bartas,  the  rest  of  the 
glittering  and  fashionable  Petrarchists  of  Paris,  what  were 
they  in  the  eyes  of  this  implacable  despot  of  the  new  in- 
tellectual order?  They  were  simply  "little  monsters  "  who 
were  "dishonouring"  what  he  worshipped  with  a  fanatic 
zeal,  the  language  of  France. 

137 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

When  we  turn  to  his  own  poetry,  we  see  what  there 
was  in  it  which  fascinated  the  opening  seventeenth  century. 
After  all  the  tortures  and  the  spasms,  the  quietude  of  it  was 
delicious.  If  you  go  to  Malherbe  now,  you  must  learn 
to  put  aside  all  your  romantic  preoccupations.  His  verse 
is  very  largely  concerned  with  negations :  it  is  not  orna- 
mented, it  is  not  preposterous,  it  is  not  pedantic.  It  swept 
away  all  the  insincere  imagery  and  all  the  violent  oddities 
of  the  earlier  school.  For  example,  Bertaut  had  written, 
wishing  to  explain  his  tears  : 

By  the  hydraulic  of  mine  eyes 
The  humid  vapours  of  my  grief  are  drawn 
Throug-h  vacuums  of  my  sighs. 

Desportes  had  talked  of  a  lover  who  was  "intoxicated  by 
the  delectation  of  the  concert  of  the  divine  harmony  "  of 
his  mistress.  All  this  preciousness,  all  this  affectation  of 
the  use  of  scientific  terms  in  describing  simple  emotions, 
was  the  object  of  Malherbe's  ruthless  disdain.  Ronsard 
had  said,  "The  more  words  we  have  in  our  language,  the 
more  perfect  it  will  be."  Malherbe  replied,  "No,  certainly 
not,  if  they  are  useless  and  grotesque  words,  dragged  by 
the  hair  of  their  heads  out  of  Greek  and  Latin,  an  outrage 
on  the  purity  of  French  grammar."  He  advised  his 
disciples  to  eject  the  monstrous  creations  of  the  neo- 
Hellenes,  and  to  go  down  to  the  quays  of  Paris  and  listen 
to  the  dock-labourers.  They  used  genuine  French  words 
which  ought  to  be  redeemed  from  vulgar  use,  and  brought 
back  to  literary  service. 

The  existing  poems  of  iMalherbe,  written  at  intervals 
during  the  last  twenty  years  of  his  life,  are  largely  pieces 
of  circumstance.  They  are  odes  on  public  events,  such  as 
the  retaking  of  Marseilles,  the  official  journeys  of  the 
King,  the  regency  of  the  Queen  Mother,  and  the  alliance 
between  France  and  Spain.  They  are  elegies  on  the 
deaths  of  private  persons,  a  subject  on  which  Malherbe 
expatiates  with  the  utmost  dignity  and  solemnity.  They 
are  sonnets,  very  unlike  the  glittering  rosy  gimcracks  of 
the  preceding  generation,  but  stiff  with  statelv  compliment 

138 


Malherbe  and  the  Classical  Reaction 

and  colourless  art.  There  is  no  exact  English  analogue 
to  the  poetry  of  Malherbe,  because  in  the  seventeenth 
century  whenever  English  verse,  except  in  the  hands  of 
Milton,  aimed  at  an  effect  of  rhetorical  majesty,  its  stream 
became  clouded.  We  may  observe  the  case  of  Cowley, 
who,  I  think,  had  certainly  read  Malnerbe  and  was  in- 
fluenced by  him,  in  spite  of  the  diametrical  views  they 
nourished  with  regard  to  the  merit  of  Pindar.  Cowley,  at 
his  rare  and  occasional  best,  has  the  same  serious  music, 
the  same  clear  roll  of  uplifted  enthusiasm,  the  same 
absolute  assurance  as  Malherbe.  He  has  the  same  felicity 
in  his  sudden  and  effective  openings.  But  there  is  too 
frequently  confusion,  artifice,  and  negligence  in  Cowley. 
In  Malherbe  all  is  perfectly  translucent,  nothing  turbid  is 
allowed  to  confuse  the  vision,  no  abuse  of  wit  is  left  to 
dazzle  the  attention  or  trip  up  steadily  advancing  progress 
of  thought.  It  is  not  easy  to  give  an  impression  in  English 
of  the  movement  of  this  clear  and  untrammelled  advance. 
But  here  are  a  couple  of  stanzas  from  the  1611  Ode  to 
the  Queen  Regent  on  occasion  of  the  King's  Mediterranean 
expedition  : 

Ah!  may  beneath,  thy  son's  proud  arm  down  fall 

The  bastions  of  the  Memphian  wall, 
And  from  Marseilles  to  Tyre  itself  extend 
His  empire  without  end. 

My  wishes,   p'rhaps,   are  wild ;  but — by  your  leave — 

What  cannot  ardent  prayer  achieve? 
And  if  the  gods  reward  your  service  so 

They'll  pay  but  what  they  owe. 

By  general  consent  the  crown  of  Malherbe's  poetic 
genius  is  the  famous  "Consolation  to  Monsieur  Du  P^rier 
on  the  death  of  his  daughter."  It  contains  the  best-known 
line  of  Malherbe — 

Et,  Rose,  elle  a  v^cu  ce  que  vivent  les  roses, 

about  which  I  would  merely  say  that  it  is  one  of  those 
accidental  romantic  verses  which  occur  here  and  there  in 

139 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

all  the  great  classical  poets.  There  are  several  in  Pope, 
where  they  are  no  more  characteristic  of  his  general  style 
than  is  this  of  Malherbe's.  So  far  from  being  the  chief 
line  in  the  poem,  it  is,  in  spite  of  its  beauty,  the  least 
important  to  us  in  our  present  inquiry.  The  "Consola- 
tion "  consists  of  twenty-one  stanzas,  written  long  after  the 
sad  event  of  the  death  of  the  young  lady,  whose  name,  by 
the  way,  was  not  Rose,  but  Marguerite.  The  advice  which 
the  poet  gives  to  the  stricken  father  is  stoical  and  Roman. 
Weary  yourself  no  more  with  these  useless  and  prolonged 
lamentations;  but  henceforth  be  wise,  and  love  a  shadow 
as  a  shadow,  and  extinguish  the  memory  of  extinguished 
ashes.  The  instances  of  Priam  and  Alcides  may  seem  to 
have  little  in  them  to  cheer  Du  P^rier,  but  we  must  remem- 
ber that  antiquity  was  held  a  more  sacred  authority  three 
hundred  years  ago  than  it  is  now.  Malherbe,  with  great 
decorum,  recalls  to  Du  P^rier  the  fact  that  he  himself  has 
lost  two  beloved  children.  The  poor  man  under  his 
thatched  roof  is  subject  to  the  laws  of  death,  nor  can  the 
guard  on  watch  at  the  gates  of  the  Louvre  protect  our 
kings  against  it.  To  complain  of  the  inevitable  sacrifice, 
and  to  lose  patience  with  Providence,  is  to  lack 
wisdom.  The  only  philosophy  which  can  bring  repose 
to  a  heart  bereaved  is  implicit  submission  to  the  will 
of  God. 

All  this  may  not  seem  very  original,  but  it  is  exquisitely 
phrased,  and  it  is  sensible,  dignified,  and  wholesome. 
There  is  in  it  a  complete  absence  of  the  ornament  and 
circumstance  of  death  which  had  taken  so  preposterous  a 
place  in  the  abundant  elegiac  poetry  of  the  sixteenth 
century.  We  are  familiar  with  the  grotesque  and 
sumptuous  appeals  to  the  macabre  which  we  meet  with  in 
Raleigh,  in  Donne,  in  Quarles,  all  the  dismal  trappings 
of  the  tomb  and  embroideries  of  the  winding-sheet.  They 
are  wholly  set  aside  by  Malherbe,  whose  sonnet  on  the 
death  of  his  son  is  worthy  of  special  study.  This  young 
man,  who  was  the  pride  of  the  poet's  life,  was  killed  in  a 
duel,  or,  as  the  father  vociferously  insisted,  murdered  by 
a  treacherous  ruffian.     Malherbe  made  the  courts  ring  with 

140 


Malherbe  and  the  Classical  Reaction 

his  appeals,  but  he  also  composed  a  sonnet,  which  is  a 
typical  example  of  his  work.  It  is  not  what  we  should 
call  "poetical,"  but  in  clearness,  in  force,  in  full  capacity 
to  express  exactly  what  the  author  had  in  mind  to  say,  it  is 
perfect.  ,We  seem  to  hear  the  very  cry  of  the  fierce  old 
man  shrieking  for  revenge  on  the  slayer  of  his  son.  The 
sonnet  was  composed  some  time  after  the  event,  for  the 
whole  art  of  Malherbe  was  the  opposite  of  improvisation. 
One  amusing  instance  of  his  deliberate  method  is  to  be 
found  in  the  history  of  his  ode  to  console  President  Nicolas 
de  Verdun  on  the  death  of  his  wife.  Malherbe  composed 
his  poem  so  slowly,  that  while  he  was  writing  it  the 
President  widower  not  merely  married  a  second  time,  but 
died.  The  poet,  with  consummate  gravity,  persisted  in  his 
task,  and  was  able  to  present  the  widow  with  the  consola- 
tion which  her  late  husband  should  have  received  after  the 
death  of  her  predecessor. 

During  thirty  years  of  growing  celebrity,  Malherbe 
fought  for  his  doctrine.  He  had  but  slowly  become  a 
convert  to  his  own  laws,  but  when  once  they  were  clearly 
set  out  in  his  brain,  he  followed  them  scrupulously,  and  he 
insisted  that  the  world  should  obey  them  too.  It  seems  a 
strange  thing  that  it  was  the  young  men  who  followed 
him  first,  and  with  most  enthusiasm,  until  the  fashionable 
ladies  of  Paris  began  to  compete  with  one  another  in 
support  of  the  classical  doctrine,  and  in  repudiation  of 
their  old  favourite  Desportes,  whose  fame  came  down 
clattering  in  a  single  night,  like  Beckford's  tower  at  Font- 
hill.  Malherbe  brought  poetry  into  line  with  the  Court 
and  the  Church,  in  a  decent  formality.  Largely,  as  is 
always  the  case  in  the  history  of  literature,  the  question 
was  one  more  of  language  than  of  substance.  Take,  for 
example,  the  "Stanzas  to  Alcandre  on  the  Return  of 
Oranthe  to  Fontainebleau,"  and  you  will  find  them  as 
preposterous  in  sentiment,  as  pretentious  and  affected  in 
conception,  as  any  sonnet  of  Desportes,  perhaps  more  so, 
but  their  diction  is  perfectly  simple  and  graceful,  and  they 
are  composed  in  faultless  modern  French.  Long  before 
iMoli^re  was  born  Malherbe  was  in  the  habit  of  reading  his 

141 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

verses  to  an  old  servant,  and  if  there  was  a  single 
phrase  which  gave  her  difficulty,  he  would  scrupulously 
revise  it. 

He  was  supported  by  a  sublime  conviction  of  his  own 
value.  It  was  a  commonplace  in  all  the  poetical  literature 
of  the  sixteenth  century  to  claim  immortality.  Desportes 
had  told  his  mistress  that  she  would  live  for  ever  like  the 
Phoenix,  in  the  flame  of  his  sonnets.  We  all  remember 
Shakespeare's  boast  that  "not  marble,  nor  the  gilded 
monuments  of  princes  shall  outlive  this  powerful  rhyme." 
But  no  one  was  ever  more  certain  of  leaving  behind  him 
a  lasting  monument  than  Malherbe.  He  said,  addressing 
the  King  : 

All  pour  their  praise  on  you,  but  not  with  equal  hand, 
For  while  a  common  work  survives  one  year  or  two, 
What  Malherbe  writes  is  stamped  with  immortality. 

The  self-gratulation  at  the  close  of  the  noble  "lie  de 
R6  "  ode  is  quite  disconcerting.  In  this  case,  also,  he 
reminds  the  King  that 

The  great  Amphion,  he  whose  voice  was  nonpareil. 

Amazed  the  universe  by  fanes  it  lifted  high; 
Yet  he  with  all  his  art  has  builded  not  so  well 
As  by  my  verse  have  I. 

His  boast,  extravagant  as  it  sounds,  was  partly  justified. 
Not  in  his  own  verse,  but  in  that  which  his  doctrine 
encouraged  others  to  write — and  not  in  verse  only,  but 
in  prose,  and  in  the  very  arrangement  and  attitude  of 
the  French  intellect — Malherbe's  influence  was  wide- 
spreading,  was  potent,  and  will  never  be  wholly  super- 
seded. He  found  French,  as  a  literary  language,  confused, 
chaotic,  no  longer  in  the  stream  of  sound  tradition.  He 
cleared  out  the  channel,  he  dredged  away  the  mud  and 
cut  down  the  weeds;  and  he  brought  the  pure  water  back 
to  its  proper  course.  Let  us  not  suppose  that  he  did  this 
completely,  or  that  his  authority  was  not  challenged.     It 

142 


Malherbe  and  the  Classical  Reaction 

was,  and  Malherbe  did  not  live  to  see  the  victory  of  his 
ideas.  He  did  not  survive  long  enough  to  found  the 
Academic,  or  to  welcome  Vaugelas,  the  great  grammarian 
who  would  have  been  the  solace  of  his  old  age.  There 
were  still  many  men  of  talent,  such  as  Pelisson  and 
Agrippa  d'Aubign^,  who  resisted  his  doctrine.  But  he 
had  made  his  great  appeal  for  order  and  regularity;  he  had 
wound  his  slug-horn  in  the  forest.  He  had  poured  his 
ideas  into  the  fertile  brain  of  Richelieu ;  he  had  started 
the  momentous  discussions  of  the  Hotel  Rambouillet.  He 
had  taught  a  new  generation  to  describe  objects  in  general 
terms,  to  express  natural  ideas  with  simplicity,  to  s€-lect 
with  scrupulous  care  such  words  as  were  purely  French 
and  no  others,  to  eschew  hiatus  and  inversion  and  to 
purify  rhyme,  to  read  the  ancients  with  sympathetic  atten- 
tion but  not  to  pillage  them.  His  own  limitations  were 
marked.  He  seems  to  have  had  no  sense  whatever  for 
external  nature ;  while  he  overvalued  a  mathematical  exacti- 
tude of  balance  in  versification  and  a  grandiose  severity 
in  rhetoric. 

But  we  are  not  attempting  this  afternoon  to  define  the 
French  Classic  School,  but  merely  to  comprehend  how 
and  when  it  came  into  being.  It  preceded  our  own 
Classic  School  by  the  fifty  years  which  divide  Malherbe 
from  Dryden,  who,  in  like  manner,  but  with  far  less 
originality,  freed  poetry  from  distortion,  prolixity,  and 
artifice.  When  Malherbe  died  no  one  could  guess  how 
prodigious  would  be  the  effect  of  his  teaching.  Indeed, 
at  that  moment,  October  6,  1628,  there  might  even  seem 
to  be  a  certain  retrogression  to  the  old  methods,  a 
certain  neglect  of  the  new  doctrine,  which  seemed  to 
have  been  faintly  taken  up.  But,  looking  back,  we  now 
see  that  at  the  moment  of  Malherbe's  death,  Corneille 
was  on  the  point  of  appearing,  while  there  were  children 
in  the  nurseries  who  were  to  be  La  Fontaine,  Pascal, 
Moli^re,  Mme.  de  Sevign^,  Bossuet.  Boileau  and  Racine 
were  not  even  born,  for  Malherbe  sowed  early  and  the 
harvest  came  late. 

The  ruling  passion  accompanied  this  resolute  reformer 

143 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

to  the  very  close  of   his  career.       His  faithful   disciple, 
Racan,  his  Boswell,  has  drawn  for  us  the  last  scene  : 

One  hour  before  he  died,  Mr.  de  Malhcrbc  woke  with  a 
start  out  of  a  deep  slumber,  to  rebuke  his  hostess,  who  was 
also  his  nurse,  for  using  an  expression  which  he  did  not 
consider  to  be  correct  French.  When  his  confessor  ventured 
to  chide  him,  he  replied  that  he  could  not  help  it,  and  that  he 
wished  to  preserve  up  to  the  moment  of  his  death  the  purity  of 
the  French  language. 


144 


THE  FOUNDATION  OF  THE  FRENCH 
ACADEMY 

FOR  three  centuries  past  there  have  been  frequent 
discussions  as  to  the  possibiHty  <-"  founding  an 
Academy  of  Letters  in  England,  bat  it  ^vas  not  until 
June,  1910,  that  a  modest  and  partial  experiment  in  this 
direction  was  successfully  made.  After  long  deliberations 
between  two  accredited  bodies,  the  Royal  Society  of  Litera- 
ture and  the  Society  of  Authors,  thirty-three  persons  were 
nominated  to  form,  within  the  corporation  of  the  former, 
an  Academic  Committee  which  should  attempt  to  exercise 
something  resembling  the  functions  of  the  Academic 
Fran^aise.  Lord  Morley  was  elected  President,  and  now, 
without  claiming  any  excessive  publicity,  this  Academic 
Committee,  founded  for  the  protection  and  encouragement 
of  a  pure  English  style  in  prose  and  verse,  has  occupied  a 
position  in  letters  which  gives  every  evidence  of  persisting 
and  increasing.  It  was  assailed,  as  was  natural  and  right, 
by  satire  and  by  caricature,  but  it  has  survived  the  attacks 
which  were  directed  against  it,  and  there  can  be  little  doubt 
that,  with  good  luck,  it  may  become  a  prominent  feature  of 
our  intellectual  and  social  system.  Already,  although  so 
young,  it  has  received  that  consecration  of  death  which 
makes  it  a  part  of  history.  No  fewer  than  eight,  that  is  to 
say  nearly  a  quarter,  of  its  original  members  have  passed 
away,  and  among  them  those  delicate  humanists  Butcher 
and  Verrall,  a  poet  so  philosophical  as  Alfred  Lyall,  critics 
of  such  fine  temper  as  Andrew  Lang  and  Edward  Dowden. 
Like  the  Acad6mie  Fran^aise,  the  Academic  Committee 
has  its  parti  des  dues,  and  it  mourns  the  loss  of  an  exquisite 
amateur,   G€orge  Wyndham.     These  men  leave  to  their 

145 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

successors   the    memory    of    lives   devoted   to   the    purest 
literature.* 

This,  then,  seems  a  not  inappropriate  moment  for  con- 
sidering more  closely  in  detail  than  has  commonly  been 
done,  the  circumstances  attending  the  most  successful 
experiment  that  the  world  has  seen  to  create  and  sustain 
a  public  body  whose  duty  it  should  be  to  guard  the  purity 
of  a  national  language  and  to  insure  the  permanence  of 
its  best  literary  forms.  It  will  not  be  necessary  here  to 
do  more  than  remind  our  readers  that  the  Acad6mie  Fran- 
^aise  was  not  the  earliest  corporation  in  Europe,  or  even 
in  France,  which  was  formed  for  the  purpose  of  carrying 
out  these  difficult  and  perilous  designs.  It  was  simply  the 
most  successful  and  the  most  durable.  As  early  as  about 
the  year  1490,  an  Academy  was  founded  in  Florence  in 
the  deepest  piety  of  the  Renaissance.  Its  motives  were 
pathetically  Greek.  The  gardens  of  the  Medicis  were  to 
represent  Academe;  Arno  was  to  be  its  Cephisus;  in  the 
great  Plotinist,  Marsiglio  Ficino,  it  was  to  find  its  incom- 
parable leader,  its  visible  Plato.  By  the  sixteenth  century, 
Italy  was  full  of  imitations;  there  were  the  Intronati  at 
Siena,  the  Delia  Crusca  at  Florence,  the  Otiosi  at  Bologna, 
the  Humorist!  and  the  Fantastici  in  Rome.  In  France 
itself,  in  1570,  the  poets  of  the  Pleiade  instituted,  under 
Charles  IX,  their  Academic  de  Musique  et  de  Poesie,  which 
became  in  due  course  the  Academic  du  Palais,  and  died 
inglorious  during  the  Civil  Wars.  Later  there  was 
founded,  in  Savoy,  that  Academic  Florimontane,  which 
flourished  for  a  little  while  under  St.  Francois  de  Sales. 
It  was  in  imitation  of  those  vague  and  ephemeral  institu- 
tions that,  supported  by  the  powerful  patronage  of  Riche- 
lieu, the  great  corporation  which  still  exercises  so  lively 
an  influence  in  France  came,  in  the  fulness  of  the  seven- 
teenth century,  into  permanent  existence.  It  is  too  seldom 
realized  out  of  what  accidental  conjunction  of  circum- 
stances it  arose,  and  how  humble  and  unfavourable  were 
the  auspices  which  attended  its  birth. 

^  Since   this   was   written    the   Academic    Committee   has   lost    Henry 
James,  Lady  Ritchie  and  Austin  Dobson. 

146 


The  Foundation  of  the  French  Academy 

The  French  Academy  came  into  the  world  so  silently, 
and  was  long  so  inconspicuous,  that  it  is  difficult  to  point 
to  its  exact  source.  But  there  is  no  doubt  that  its  inception 
was  due  to  the  hospitable  temper  and  the  intellectual  curi- 
osity of  a  young  man  whose  name  deserves  well  of  the 
world.  He  was  not  a  great  writer,  nor  even  a  great  scholar, 
but  he  possessed  to  an  extraordinary  degree  the  gift  of 
literary  solidarity.  In  the  year  1629,  Valentin  Conrart, 
who  was  twenty-six  years  of  age,  was  living  in  a  convenient 
and  agreeable  house  at  the  corner  of  the  Rue  Saint  Martin 
and  the  Rue  des  Vielles-Etuves.  About  this  time  his  rela- 
tive, probably  his  cousin,  Antoine  Godeau,  two  years 
younger  than  Conrart,  came  up  to  Paris  from  Dreux  to 
seek  his  fortune.  It  is  thought  that  he  lodged  with  his 
cousin;  at  all  events  Conrart  looked  after  him  in  his 
universally  obliging  way.  Godeau  confessed  that  he  wrote 
verses,  and  he  showed  them  to  Conrart,  who  adored  poetry, 
and  who  burned  to  spread  an  appreciation  of  it.  He 
thought  his  kinsman's  verses  good,  and  he  invited  a  few 
of  his  literary  friends  to  come  and  listen  to  them.  No 
doubt  he  asked  them  to  dinner,  for  he  had  a  famous  cook ; 
and  after  dinner  the  company  settled  down  to  listen.  The 
poet  was  excessively  short  and  preposterously  ugly,  but 
he  was  subtle  and  agreeable,  and  he  already  possessed  to 
a  conspicuous  degree  the  art  of  pleasing. 

When  the  future  bishop  of  Grasse  and  Vence  had 
recited  his  poems,  which  were  love-pieces  and  doubtless  of 
a  light  description — for  he  afterwards  begged  them  back 
from  Conrart  and  burned  them — the  conversation  became 
general,  and  the  evening  passed  so  pleasantly  that  the 
company  was  unanimous  that  these  instructive  and  enter- 
taining meetings  must  be  repeated.  There  were  eight  of 
these  friends  gathered  together,  all  authors  or  men 
intimately  occupied  with  literature.  They  were  agreed  in 
determining  to  keep  up  their  discussions,  and  first  of  all 
it  was  proposed  that  they  should  meet  successively  in  each 
other's  houses.  But  no  one  of  them  was  rich,  and  Con- 
rart's  house  was  far  the  most  comfortably  situated ;  he  was 
anxious  to  be  the  perpetual  host,  and  the  rest  were  glad  to 

147 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

give  way  to  him.  They  decided  to  meet  once  every  week 
to  discuss  literature  and  language  in  Conrart's  house  at 
the  corner  of  the  Rue  Saint  Martin.  The  names  of  the 
eight  friends  are  not  equally  celebrated  in  the  history  of 
French  literature;  most  of  them,  indeed,  are  not  celebrated 
at  all;  but  I  must  record  them  here,  before  I  proceed, 
because  of  the  leading  part  they  took  at  the  inception  of 
the  Academie.  They  were  Chapelain,  Conrart,  Godeau, 
Gombauld,  Philippe  Habert,  Habert  de  Cerisy,  Serisay, 
and  Malleville.  We  must  try  to  form  some  impression  of 
each  of  them,  though  most  are  but  fugitive  and  phantasmal 
figures. 

Of  Valentin  Conrart  a  tolerably  clear  image  can  be 
formed  by  collating  what  the  memoir-writers  have  recorded 
of  him.  It  was  much  noted  that  he  was  no  scholar;  like 
Shakespeare  he  had  little  Latin  and  less  Greek ;  indeed  it 
was  roundly  asserted  that  he  had  none  of  either.  But  he 
studied  much  Italian  and  Spanish,  and  he  had  a  fine 
library  exclusively  of  modern  literature.  He  wrote  a  great 
deal  in  prose  and  verse,  but  mainly  for  his  private  pleasure  ; 
he  kept  a  prudent  silence  about  his  works,  which  were 
understood  to  be  mediocre.  He  was  always  an  invalid; 
already,  in  his  youth,  he  began  to  be  a  sufferer  from  the 
gout,  which  was  to  torture  him  for  thirty  years.  But 
pain  did  not  affect  his  temper,  nor  his  extraordinary 
gregariousness.  He  lived  for  the  small  enjoyments  of 
others.  He  was  the  confidant  of  everybody,  the  healer  of 
all  quarrels  and  disputes.  As  time  went  on,  and  Conrart 
became  absorbed  in  the  duties  of  perpetual  Secretary  to 
the  Academie,  his  qualities  may  have  become  exaggerated. 
His  enemies  began  to  say  that  he  was  too  indulgent,  too 
easy-going  with  offenders.  The  super-subtle  declared  that 
he  had  become  infatuated  with  his  own  friendliness,  and 
that  he  went  through  Paris  murmuring  "  Ah  !  ma  belle 
amitie  !  "  He  was  a  great  depositary  of  secrets,  and  liked 
nothing  so  much  as  to  run  about — or  rather,  poor  man  ! 
to  hobble  about — pouring  oil  upon  troubled  waters.  Talle- 
mant  des  Reaux,  who  hated  him,  says  that  Conrart  had 
an  unpleasant  wife,  whose  face  w-as  like  a  gingerbread  nut, 

148 


The  Foundation  of  the  French  Academy 

but  we   need  not   believe  all   that  Tallemant  des   Reaux 
says. 

Conrart,  however,  with  all  his  serviceable  friendliness, 
could  not  have  done  much  without  Chapelain,  who  was 
really  the  founder  of  the  Academie.  Jean  Chapelain  was 
not  merely  an  active  man  of  letters,  he  was  the  man  of 
letters  pure  and  simple.  He  had,  in  that  age  of  intellectual 
curiosity,  a  passion  for  literature  not  surpassed,  if  equalled, 
by  a  single  contemporary.  M.  Lanson  has  shown,  what 
scarcely  needed  showing,  that  Chapelain  was  no  artist,  but 
if  he  was  a  bad  poet,  he  was  intensely  interested  in  the 
technique  of  poetry.  He  has  been  called  the  founder  of 
French  criticism ;  he  had  pertinacity,  courage,  and  a 
passionate  love  for  the  French  language.  Perhaps  he  was 
the  inventor  of  the  law  of  the  Three  Unities  in  drama. 
His  influence  in  French  thought  lasted  until  the  days  of 
Boileau.  In  1629  Chapelain  was  thirty-five  years  of  age, 
old  enough  and  dogmatic  enough  to  impress  his  will  and 
his  opinions  on  his  younger  companions.  Because  he  was 
a  detestable  epic  and  a  ridiculous  lyric  poet,  because  we 
cannot  be  drawn  by  wild  horses  to  read  the  Pucelle  or  the 
Ode  a  Richelieu,  we  must  not  overlook  the  fact  that  Chape- 
lain was  one  of  the  great  intellectual  forces  of  his  time, 
although  when  the  meetings  began  he  had  scarcely  printed 
anything  except  the  much-discussed  Preface  de  VAdone 
(1623).  Ceremonious  and  yet  rough,  a  courtier  and  yet  a 
sort  of  astute  Diogenes,  hating  all  luxury  and  ruining  him- 
self to  buy  rare  books,  a  stormy  petrel  in  every  literary 
tempest,  Chapelain  presents  to  us  the  shrewd  and  violent 
figure  of  a  captain  who  steered  the  youthful  Academie 
through  its  vicissitudes  into  safe  anchorage. 

Among  all  these  young  men,  there  was  one  old  man, 
and  he  too,  like  Chapelain,  was  an  authentic  man  of  letters. 
This  was  Jean  Ogier,  Sieur  de  Gombauld,  who  was  not 
less  than  sixty  years  of  age  already.  He  had  been  born 
youngest  son  in  the  fourth  marriage  of  a  redoubtable 
Huguenot  of  Xaintogne,  and  he  came  to  Paris  towards  the 
end  of  the  reign  of  Henry  IV,  with  a  mass  of  strange  MSS. 
He  was  very  poor,  very  proud,  extravagant  and  eccentric 
K  149 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

to  the  last  degree.  He  managed  to  appear  at  Court,  and 
there  must  have  been  something  striking  about  him,  since 
his  fortune  began  by  Marie  de  Medicis  noticing  him  at  the 
coronation  of  Louis  XIII.  It  was  said  that  she  saw  in  him 
a  striking  Hkeness  to  a  man  of  whom  she  had  been  very 
fond  years  before  in  Florence.  After  the  ceremony,  the 
Queen-Mother  sent  for  Gombauld,  and  he  was  attached  to 
her  Court,  where  he  was  called  "le  Beau  T^nebreux,"  but 
he  remained  very  shy  and  helpless.  He  nourished  a 
frenzied  passion  for  her  Majesty,  yet  was  incapable  of 
speech  or  movement  in  her  presence;  during  his  brief 
splendour  at  Court,  he  wrote  the  most  famous  of  his  works, 
the  romance  of  Endymion  (1624),  in  which  the  Queen- 
Mother  appeared  as  that  leading  character,  "La  Lune." 
There  are  delightful  stories  of  the  gaiicherie  and  pathetic 
simplicity  of  this  old  poet,  who  was  a  very  fine  country 
gentleman,  always  carefully  dressed,  holding  his  tall, 
spare  figure  well  upright,  and  with  quantities  of  real  hair 
pushing  out  his  wig  on  all  sides.  Gombauld,  in  spite  of 
"La  Lune,"  could  never  feel  at  his  ease  in  the  presence  of 
fine  ladies,  and  sighed  for  a  farmer's  daughter.  After  the 
death  of  Richelieu,  all  the  pensions  were  struck  off,  and 
Gombauld  grew  very  poor  and  wrinkled.  He  was  touched 
with  the  mania  of  persecution,  and  became  rather  a  terror 
to  his  fellow-Academicians,  one  of  whom  called  him  "the 
most  ceremonious  and  the  most  mysterious  of  men."  He 
grew  to  be  very  unhappy,  but  like  Tithonus  could  not  die, 
and  he  was  "a  white-haired  shadow  roaming  like  a 
dream  "  in  the  world  of  Moli^re  and  Racine.  He  died, 
at  the  age  of  ninety-six,  in  1666,  having  been  born  in 
the  lifetime  of  Ronsard,  and  out-living  the  birth  of 
Massillon. 

The  other  four  members  of  the  original  group  have  not 
left  so  deep  a  mark  on  the  history  of  literature.  Jacques 
de  S^risay  was  accustomed  to  literary  coteries,  for  he 
had  been  a  constant  attendant  on  Montaigne's  adopted 
daughter,  that  enthusiastic  and  grotesque  old  maid,  Mile. 
Marie  de  Gournay,  who  loved  to  collect  the  wits  around 
her  "shadow  "  and  her  cat,  Donzelle.     Serisay  cannot  have 

150 


The  Foundation  of  the  French  Academy 

been  a  man  of  letters  of  much  force,  since  his  works,  to 
the  end  of  time,  consisted  of  half  a  tragedy,  which  he  could 
never  finish.  Later  on  he  contrived  to  read  this  fragment 
aloud  to  Richelieu,  who  yielded  to  fatigue  before  the  end 
of  the  exercise.  This  vague  person  was  known  as  "le 
delicat  S6risay."  Then,  there  was  Claude  de  Malleville, 
who  had  just  come  back  from  attending  Bassompierre  in 
England.  He  was  a  man  of  considerable  originality  of 
character,  and  afterwards  a  power  in  the  Academic.  He 
liked  the  pleasant  informality  of  the  meetings  at  Conrart's 
house,  and  objected  to  their  being  turned  into  official 
sessions.  We  shall  see  that  he  stood  alone,  a  little  later, 
in  stout  opposition  to  the  proposals  of  the  Cardinal.  Malle- 
ville was  a  little  wisp  of  a  man,  with  black  locks  and  dim 
dark  eyes.  He  translated  vaguely  and  amorously  from  the 
Italian,  and  had  a  great  deal  to  do  with  the  composition  of 
the  Guirlande  de  Julie.  Except  for  some  O vidian  Epistles, 
which  he  is  said  to  have  published  as  early  as  1620, 
Malleville's  own  poems  were  posthumous.  M.  Magne 
says  that  Malleville  w^as  "un  faiseur  de  bibus  "  (a  term  of 
contempt  almost  beyond  the  range  of  translation)  "qui 
fretillait  autour  des  jupes  "  ;  but  that  is  because  he  opposed 
Boisrobert.  Shadows  they  were,  and  shadows  they 
pursued. 

Most  shadowy  of  all  are  to  us  now  the  tw^o 
Haberts.  Germain  Habert,  the  youngest  of  the  original 
Academiciens,  wrote  a  very  affected  poem  on  the  meta- 
morphosis of  the  eyes  of  Phillis  into  stars.  As  he  grew 
older  he  neglected  Phillis  to  devote  himself  to  good  works. 
Menage,  who  was  his  friend,  says  he  was  "un  des  plus 
beaux  esprits  de  son  temps."  But  where  are  the  evidences 
of  his  wit?  His  brother,  Philippe  Habert,  is  the  last  of 
the  original  coterie  and  the  faintest  phantom  of  them  all. 
He  was  a  soldier  in  the  artillery,  and  he  was  killed,  in 
1637,  at  the  siege  of  Emery,  crushed  under  a  wall  that  had 
been  accidentally  blown  up  by  gunpowder.  Just  before 
this  melancholy  event,  Philippe  Habert  had  prophetically 
published  his  poem  called  Le  Ternfle  de  la  Mort,  which 
was  very  much  admired,  but  is  now  not  easily  accessible. 

151 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

He  was  a  cold  and  solemn  young  man,  reserved  in  manner, 
but  held  to  be  both  brave  and  friendly. 

Such  were  the  eight  companions  who  met,  week  by 
week,  all  innocent  and  unconscious,  to  discuss  in  familiar 
intercourse  every  species  of  subject — business,  the  news 
of  the  day,  the  movement  of  letters.  If  any  one  of  them 
had  written  something,  as  frequently  happened,  he  would 
read  it  aloud,  and  ask  for  criticism,  which  would  be 
frankly  given.  Often  their  discussions  would  end  in  a 
stroll  through  the  streets,  or  in  a  meal  prepared  by  Con- 
rart's  really  estimable  chef.  It  was  a  delightful  time,  and, 
in  after  years,  when  the  Academie  was  celebrated  and 
powerful,  the  original  members  looked  back  wistfully  at 
this  happy  period  of  almost  pastoral  quietude.  Pellisson, 
interviewing  the  survivors  in  a  later  generation,  says  that 
"ils  parlent  encore  aujourd'hui  de  ce  premier  age  de 
I'Academie,  comme  d'un  age  d'or,  durant  lequel  avec 
toute  I'innocence  et  toute  la  liberte  des  premiers  si^cles, 
sans  bruit  et  sans  pompe,  et  sans  autres  lois  que  celles 
de  I'amitie,  ils  goutaient  ensemble  tout  ce  que  la  societe 
des  esprits  et  la  vie  raisonnable  ont  de  plus  doux  et  de 
plus  charmant." 

It  is  curious  and  interesting  to  find  that  this  "little 
clan,"  as  Keats  would  call  it,  contrived  to  preserv-e  its 
unity  and  its  privacy  for  several  years.  The  friends  met, 
as  we  have  seen,  with  remarkable  frequency,  yet  they  did 
not  quarrel,  nor  grow  bored,  nor  break  up  through  the 
action  of  any  outward  accident.  It  is,  surely,  even  in 
much  quieter  centuries  than  ours,  unusual  that  a  party  of 
this  kind  should  continue  to  exist,  suspended  as  in  a 
vacuum,  not  dwindling  nor  increasing,  and  unknown  to 
the  world  outside.  In  those  Valois  times,  such  a  collec- 
tion of  persons  would  be  in  danger  of  being  accused  of 
political  plotting,  and  so  the  visitors  to  Conrart  were 
pledged  to  an  absolute  silence.  This  pledge  was  first 
broken  by  Malleville,  who  told  Nicolas  Faret,  apparently 
in  1632.  Faret  was  a  young  provincial  lawyer,  lately 
arrived  in  Paris  from  the  tow-n  of  Bourg-en-Bresse.  He 
was  still  very  poor,  but  ingenious  and  active;  he  was  a 

152 


The  Foundation  of  the  French  Academy 

disciple  of  the  great  grammarian,  Vaugelas,  and  later  the 
intimate  of  Moliere.  He  was  a  jolly  man,  with  chestnut 
hair  and  rubicund  face;  his  figure  grew  massive  as  the 
years  went  by.  Faret  was  consumed  with  curiosity,  and 
when  he  had  once  wormed  the  secret  of  the  meetings  out 
of  Malleville,  he  gave  the  latter  no  peace  until  he  con- 
sented to  introduce  him.  Faret  had  just  published  a  book 
of  some  merit  and  considerable  popularity,  L'Honnete 
Hcmme,  a  breviary  of  how  a  gentleman  should  behave, 
a  sort  of  courtier's  vade  mecum;  and  he  brought  an  early 
copy  of  this  with  him  as  a  credential.  Faret  was  an 
active,  boisterous  person,  boon  companion  of  the  more 
gifted  poet  Saint-Amant.  He  had  no  sooner  secured  a 
footing  in  Conrart's  house  than  he  made  himself  very 
useful  to  the  body,  for  he  was  by  far  the  most  business- 
like of  the  group.  It  was  Faret  who,  in  1634,  drew  up  the 
original  scheme  for  the  foundation  of  the  Academic.  He 
did  not  add  much  to  the  glory  of  the  corporation,  when 
once  it  w-as  formed,  for  the  other  members  complained  that 
he  did  not  attend  the  meetings  unless  there  was  some 
practical  business  on  hand,  and  that  then  he  was  apt  to 
be  drunk.  Faret,  who  was  attached  to  Henry  of  Lorraine, 
the  comte  d'Harcourt,  and  served  as  his  go-between  with 
Richelieu,  was  not  a  very  shining  Academicien,  but  he 
had  his  temporary  value. 

Faret's  chief  merit  was  that  he  brought  to  the  meetings 
a  man  of  letters  who  was  destined  to  take  a  very  prominent 
place,  for  the  time  being,  both  in  the  French  Academy 
and  in  literary  life — namely,  Jean  Desmarets  de  Saint- 
Sorlin.  He  was  an  indefatigable  writer,  and  a  man  exactly 
suited  to  be  useful  to  a  group  of  literary  persons,  because 
he  h^id  experience  of  the  world,  great  enthusiasm  for  the 
craft  of  letters,  and  a  wide  and  humorous  outlook  on  life. 
Chapelain,  glancing  back  many  years  later,  defined 
Desmarets  as  "un  des  esprits  les  plus  faciles  de  ce  temps," 
and  that  is  just  what  he  was,  an  inexhaustible  and  rapid 
producer  of  prose  and  verse  in  the  spirit  and  fashion  of 
the  age.  He  was  much  valued  by  Richelieu,  who  forced 
him,  against  his  will,  to  collaborate  in  the  composition  of 

153 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

tragedies.  Desmarets  had  no  dramatic  inspiration,  but  he 
was  able  to  satisfy  the  Cardinal.  At  the  time  of  which 
we  are  speaking,  probaljly  in  1633,  Desmarets  was  brought 
to  Conrart's  house  l)y  I^'aret  and  received  a  courteous 
welcome.  It  was  characteristic  of  him  that,  instantly 
entering  into  the  spirit  of  the  company,  he  pulled  out 
of  his  pocket  the  proof-sheets  of  his  new  prose 
romance  Ariane,  and  asked  leave  to  submit  them  to 
discussion. 

Desmarets  was  rich  and  influential,  and  he  had  the 
true  Academic  spirit.  He  became  a  prominent  public 
character,  and  Controller-General  of  the  King's  Army, 
but  he  never  lost  his  close  hold  upon  the  Academic,  of 
which  he  was  elected  the  first  Chancellor.  In  the  moment 
of  transition,  the  dark  hour  before  the  dawn,  he  was 
eminently  useful,  for  when,  in  1633,  Conrart  married,  and 
it  was  no  longer  convenient  to  meet  in  his  house, 
Desmarets  transferred  the  whole  cluster  of  bees  to  a  new 
hive,  the  sumptuous  Hotel  Pelleve,  which  he  had  just 
rebuilt  at  the  corner  of  the  Rue  du  Roi  de  Sicile  and  of 
the  Rue  Tison.  Then,  and  not  till  then,  did  they  begin 
seriously  to  think  of  founding  an  Academy.  Desmarets's 
numerous  writings  have  stood  the  test  of  time  very  ill. 
His  epic  of  Clovis  was  ridiculed  by  Boileau,  and  perhaps 
the  only  work  of  his  which  can  be  read  to-day  without 
boredom  is  his  comedy  of  Les  Visionnaires  (1635),  ^  rnerry 
piece  of  literary  criticism,  in  which  the  various  coteries  of 
that  day,  and  the  famous  salons,  are  satirized.  Never- 
theless, it  is  not  beyond  the  range  of  possibility  that,  in 
these  days  of  revival,  somebody  may  be  found  to  resusci- 
tate Desmarets  de  Saint-Sorlin. 

In  that  entertaining  volume,  Le  Plaisant  Ahhe  de  Bois- 
robert,  the  great  rival  of  Desmarets  has  already  found  an 
eloquent  resuscitator,  M.  Magne.  Francois  de  Metel  de 
Boisrobert  is  an  unedifying  figure  of  a  scapegrace  priest, 
whose  giggling  face  is  seen  peeping  round  most  doors  in 
the  scandalous  memoirs  of  the  time.  No  one  was  more 
contemptuously  insulted,  no  one  more  bitterly  ridiculed, 
than  Richelieu's  supple  jackal,  the  author  of  Anaxandre 

154 


The  Foundation  of  the  French  Academy 

et  Orasie  and  of  Pyrandre.  These  heroic  works  of  faded 
imagination  are  read  no  longer,  nor  the  Recueil  de  Lettres 
Nouvelles  nor  Le  Sacrifice  des  Muses.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  sarcasms  of  the  epigrammatists  and  the  scan- 
dalous tales  of  contemporaries  continue  to  invest  the 
memory  of  Boisrobert  with  a  nasty  odour.  M.  Magne, 
who  brings  a  marvellous  erudition  to  the  task,  has  bravely 
endeavoured  to  redeem  a  talent  and  a  character  so  deeply 
compromised.  We  cannot  join  in  the  whole  of  his  white- 
washing, but  we  may  admit  that  he  has  proved  the 
"plaisant  abbe"  to  be  neither  the  dunce  nor  the  black- 
guard that  legend  had  painted  him.  Moreover,  it  is  quite 
certain  that  he  exercised  a  most  useful  energy  in  the 
foundation  of  the  French  Academy. 

When  the  indiscretion  of  Faret  brought  Desmarets  to 
the  literary  meetings  in  Conrart's  house,  it  had  the  in- 
evitable result  of  exciting  the  jealous  curiosity  of  Bois- 
robert. He  was  the  great  rival  of  Desmarets  in  the 
affection  and  confidence  of  Richelieu,  and  we  may  be 
certain  that  when  "le  plaisant  abbe"  found  out  that 
Desmarets  was  attending  secret  and  mysterious  assemblies, 
he  plainly  intimated  to  Faret  that  he  also  must  be  taken 
into  the  secret  or  else  he  would  report  the  plot  to  the 
Cardinal.  Accordingly,  sometime  in  1633,  Boisrobert  too 
was  brought  to  Conrart's  house,  and  instantly  conceived 
a  great  scheme  for  his  own  honour  and  the  glory  of  French 
literature.  He  clung,  through  every  storm,  to  the  robes 
of  Richelieu,  who  had  originally  disliked  him,  but  who 
proved  in  the  long  run  powerless  to  resist  the  devotion 
and  the  entertainment  which  Boisrobert  provided.  The  poet 
took  no  snub;  on  one  occasion  when  Richelieu  had  rudely 
ignored  him,  he  flung  himself  on  his  knees,  crying  "You 
let  the  dogs  eat  the  crumbs  Avhich  fall  from  your  table. 
Am  I  not  a  dog  ?  "  The  Cardinal  admitted  that  he  was, 
and  thenceforth  Boisrobert  occupied  an  intimate  place  in 
Richelieu's  household,  sometimes  as  a  retriever,  more 
often  as  a  poodle.  It  is  impossible  to  deny  that  Bois- 
robert was  a  poltroon,  but  in  his  lifelong  devotion  to  the 
Academie  he  really  behaved  extremely  well.     The  secret, 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

no  doubt,  way,  thai  with  Ihc  minimum  of  regard  for  purity 
of  (onduct,  the  "plaisanl  abbe"  combined  a  genuine 
sobcitude  for  tlie  purity  of  language. 

It  was  Boisrobert  who  first  conceived  the  idea  that  an 
Academy  of  Letters  might  be  useful  to  Richelieu  and 
Richelieu  indispensable  to  an  Academy  of  Letters.  For 
this  scheme  he  deserves  great  credit,  and  we  gather  that 
it  was  first  to  the  Cardinal  and  not  first  to  Conrart's  friends 
that  he  spoke.  It  seems  probable  that  the  latter  had 
already  begun  to  suggest  among  themselves  that  their 
relation  might  be  permanent.  There  is  a  letter  dated 
as  early  as  December,  1632,  in  which  Godeau,  writing  to 
Chapelain,  seems  to  speak  of  the  Academie  as  already  a 
recognized  thing.  If  we  may  suppose  that  Louis  Giry, 
the  Hellenist,  who  was  not  an  original  member,  but  whose 
name  is  mentioned  as  that  of  one  of  Conrart's  friends, 
was  already  a  visitor,  the  body  now  consisted  of  twelve 
persons,  with  all  of  whom  I  have  endeavoured  to  make 
my  readers  acquainted.  It  was  after  one  of  the  meetings 
in  1633  that,  as  Pellisson  tells  us,  having  observed  w'hat 
kind  of  books  had  been  examined,  and  that  the  conversa- 
tion had  not  been  a  commerce  of  compliment  and  flattery, 
where  each  person  gave  praise  that  in  his  turn  he  might 
receive  it,  but  that  faults  of  style,  and  even  very  small  ones, 
had  been  seized  upon  boldly  and  frankly  for  discussion, 
Boisrobert  was  "fulfilled  with  joy  and  admiration."  It 
crossed  his  mind  that  this  was  the  very  toy  to  enliven  the 
petulant  leisure  of  his  Cardinal.  When  that  scheme 
occurred  to  "le  plaisant  abbe  "  the  Academie  Fran9aise 
practically  started  into  being. 

No  small  part  of  the  success  of  the  policy  of  Richelieu 
came  from  the  brilliant  intuition  which  he  had  of  the 
importance  of  regulating  intellectual  effort.  He  did  not 
ignore  the  Press,  as  had  so  stupidly  been  done  before  his 
day,  but  he  had  no  idea  of  leaving  it  to  follow  its  own 
devices.  In  1626  he  had  used  a  very  remarkable  ex- 
pression; he  had  said  "Les  faiseurs  de  livres  serviraient 
grandement  le  roi  et  ceux  qui  sont  aupr^s  de  lui,  s'ils  ne 
se  m^laient  de  parler  de  leurs  actions  ni  en  bien  ni  en 

156 


The  Foundation  of  the  French  Academy 

mal."  Literature  was  to  be  encouraged  and  protected,  on 
the  understanding  that  it  would  attend  to  its  own  affairs, 
and  not  disturb  the  King's  government  with  libelles  which 
were  none  of  its  concern.  Richelieu's  genuine  enthusiasm 
for  scholarship  and  poetry  is  not  to  be  questioned,  but 
with  it  all  he  was  pre-eminently  an  ambitious  statesman. 
Public  policy  was  the  business  of  his  life,  literature  his 
enchanting  relaxation  and  entertainment.  But  he  wished 
to  be  master  in  the  temple  of  the  Muses,  no  less  than  in 
the  King's  palace,  and  he  would  only  protect  the  author- 
ship of  the  day  on  the  terms  of  being  recognized  as  its 
absolute  tyrant.  He  was  to  be  the  Miltiades  of  letters, 
but  once  acknowledge  his  authority,  and  he  became  litera- 
ture's "best  and  truest  friend."  His  lightning  intelligence 
had  perceived,  in  1631,  the  importance  of  journalism,  and 
he  had  protected  the  earliest  of  French  newspapers,  the 
Gazette,  on  the  understanding  that  it  proceeded  from  his 
own  official  cabinet.  It  was  his  scheme  to  break  the 
prestige  of  the  nobility,  and  in  carrying  out  his  plans,  he 
was  glad  of  the  support  of  the  intellectual  classes.  He 
was  aided,  of  course,  by  the  development  of  public  feeling 
in  this  direction. 

There  can  be  little  doubt  that  it  was  by  Boisrobert 
rather  than  by  Desmarets  that  the  Cardinal  was  originally 
informed  of  the  literary  meetings  in  the  house  of  Conrart. 
His  curiosity  was  vividly  awakened.  Knots  of  persons 
meeting  privately  and  with  regularity  were  the  objects  of 
his  lively  suspicion,  and  there  is  some  reason  to  suppose 
that  his  first  impulse  was  to  break  up  the  company  and 
forbid  the  meetings.  But  Boisrobert,  who  held  his  ear, 
reassured  him. 

He  did  not  fail  [says  our  earliest  authority]  to  give  a 
favourable  report  of  the  little  assembly  in  whose  deliberations 
he  had  taken  a  part,  and  of  the  persons  who  composed  it;  and 
the  Cardinal,  whose  temper  was  naturally  attuned  to  great 
designs,  and  who  loved  the  French  language  to  infatuation, 
being  himself  an  excellent  writer,  after  having  praised  the 
scheme,  asked  M.  Boisrobert  whether  these  persons  would  not 

157 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

like  to  become  a  cor[X)r,'itioii,  and  to  meet  regularly,  and  under 
public  aiithoi  ily. 

Me  desired  Boisrobert  to  put  tliis  proposition  before  the 
next  meeting^,  as  from  himself. 

It  appears  that  at  first  the  idea  was  not  received  with 
enthusiasm.  The  friends  were  simple  men  of  letters,  not 
ambitious  of  power,  and  timid  in  the  face  of  such  formid- 
able patronage.  But  the  Cardinal  consulted  Chapelain, 
and  won  him  over  to  his  views.  There  can  be  no  doubt 
that  Desmarets  and  Faret  supported  a  plan  from  which 
they  could  reap  nothing  but  personal  advantage.  When 
the  ground  was  ready  and  the  hour  was  ripe,  Boisrobert 
came  down  to  a  meeting,  with  a  definite  proposal  from 
the  Cardinal,  who  offered  to  these  gentlemen  his  protection 
for  their  Society,  the  public  compliment  of  Letters  Patent, 
and  also — this  was  so  like  the  vehement  bonhomie  of 
Richelieu — a  promise  of  personal  affection  "en  toutes 
rencontres"  for  each  of  them  individually.  The  friends 
were,  in  fact,  to  be  attached  in  permanence  to  his  personal 
household. 

The  meeting  at  which  Boisrobert  made  this  startling 
announcement  was  one  of  which  it  would  be  interesting: 
indeed  to  have  a  detailed  report.  Unfortunately,  this  is 
wanting.  But  we  know  that  the  friends  were  smitten  with 
timidity  and  dismay.  Scarcely  any  one  of  them  but  ex- 
pressed his  vexation,  and  regretted  that  the  Cardinal  had 
done  them  this  most  unwelcome  honour,  that  he  had  come 
down  from  his  majestic  heights  to  "troubler  la  douceur 
et  la  familiarity  de  leurs  conf(^rences."  We  can  imagine 
the  agitation  and  the  anxiety,  the  babble  of  voices  which 
had  never  before  been  raised  above  the  tone  of  scholarly 
amenity.  Those  who  were  pledged  to  support  the  scheme 
doubtless  held  their  peace  until  the  storm  had  subsided,  and 
until  Serisay  and  Malleville,  who  w'ere  the  most  intractable 
opponents,  had  done  their  worst  in  denunciation  of  it. 
Then  the  voices  of  the  supporters  were  heard,  and  some- 
one, doubtless  the  honey-tongued  Boisrobert,  suggested 
that  as  Serisay  was  master  of  the  household  to  the  Due 

158 


The  Foundation  of  the  French  Academy 

de  la  Rochefoucauld,  and  Malleville  secretary  to  the 
Marechal  de  Bassompierre,  it  would,  unjustly  but  most 
inevitably,  be  telieved  that  they  were  incited  by  the 
enmity  which  their  respective  patrons  were  supposed  (but 
how  unfairly!)  to  nourish  against  the  Cardinal.  This 
impressed  the  company,  and  St^risay  withdrew  his  opposi- 
tion, but  Malleville  continued  to  be  intractable.  It  was 
important,  however,  that  the  reply  of  the  infant  Academy 
to  the  Cardinal  should  be  cordial,  and  that  it  should  be 
unanimous. 

Chapelain,  who  had  held  his  arguments  in  reserve,  now 
came  forward  with  that  mixture  of  tact  and  force  which 
was  his  great  quality.  He  was  certainly  the  most  eminent 
man  of  letters  in  the  assembly,  and  the  others  supposed 
him  to  be  more  independent  than  he  really  was.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  he  had  succumbed  to  the  fascination  of  the 
Cardinal,  who,  to  put  it  vulgarly,  had  Chapelain  safe  in 
his  pocket.  With  a  great  show  of  impartiality,  the  poet 
put  before  his  friends  the  sensible  view  that,  no  doubt,  it 
would  have  been  more  agreeable  to  continue  in  private 
their  confidential  gatherings,  but  that  it  was  no  longer  a 
question  of  what  was  agreeable.  They  had — he  would  not 
insist  on  pointing  out  how — lost  all  chance  of  keeping  them- 
selves to  themselves.  The  secret  was  out,  and  they  had 
attracted  the  attention  of  the  most  formidable  of  men,  one 
who  was  in  the  habit  of  being  implicitly  obeyed,  and  who 
was  not  accustomed  to  meet  with  resistance;  that  this  all- 
powerful  statesman  would  not  forgive  the  insult  of  their  re- 
fusing his  profTer  of  protection,  and  that  he  would  find  a  way 
to  chastise  each  individual  member.  But  certainly,  the  first 
thing  he  would  be  sure  to  do  would  be  to  disperse  their 
assembly  and  destroy  a  society  which  all  of  them  had 
already  begun  to  hope  would  be  immortal.  Nothing  more 
vvas  heard  of  Malleville's  "minority  report";  the  infant 
Academy  surrendered  unanimously.  Before  the  company 
dispersed,  M.  de  Boisrobert  was  desired  to  convey  to 
Monsieur  le  Cardinal  the  very  humble  thanks  of  the 
assembly  for  the  honour  he  designed  to  show  them,  and 
to  assure  him  that,  though  none  of  them  had  ever  dreamed 

159 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

of  such  dislinction,  they  were  all  of  (hem  resolved  to  carry 
out  the  wislie.s  ol   his  I'Jiiinencc. 

Richeheu  always  responded  to  this  sort  of  attitude. 
He  expressed  to  "le  plaisant  abbe"  his  great  satisfaction, 
and  no  doubt  they  laughed  together  in  private  over  the 
oddities  of  Conrart's  guests,  for  such  was  their  habit,  and 
such  the  influence  of  Boisrobert  over  his  master.  A  doctor 
once  facetiously  recommended,  when  the  Cardinal  was  ill, 
"two  drams  of  Boisrobert  after  every  meal."  But  in 
public,  and  in  fact,  Richelieu  took  the  most  lively  interest 
in  the  scheme.  One  is  inclined  to  believe,  that,  by  a 
flash  of  prophetic  imagination,  this  great  man  saw  what 
a  place  the  Academie  Francaise  would  take  in  the  French 
order  of  things  during  three  coming  centuries  at  least. 
He  urged  the  friends  to  meet  without  delay,  now  no  longer 
at  Conrart's,  but  in  Desmarets's  palatial  hotel,  "et  a 
penser  s^rieusement  a  I'etablissement  de  I'Academie." 
All  this  was  early  in  1634,  probably  in  February. 

The  first  direction  which  the  Cardinal  deigned  to  give 
to  the  embarrassed  and  slightly  terrified  friends  was  that 
they  should  add  to  their  number,  or  in  his  own  words  that 
"ces  Messieurs  grossirent  leur  Compagnie  de  plusieurs 
personnes  considerables  pour  leur  merite."  This  appears 
to  have  been  begun  at  the  official  sitting  of  March  20,  1634, 
and  that  may  be  considered  as  the  date  of  the  formation  of 
the  Academie.  Existing  members  sat  round  the  table, 
no  doubt,  and  names  were  suggested  and  voted  for.  It 
would  be  a  somewhat  rough-and-ready  choice,  and  the 
critical  attitude  would  not  be  precisely  that  which  would 
meet  with  approval  at  the  Institut  to-day.  But  the  errors 
of  choice  have  been  abundantly  exaggerated  by  those  who 
have  written  loosely  on  this  subject.  Before  the  end  of 
1634  they  had  added,  it  seems,  twenty-three  names  to  their 
original  list  of  eleven  (or  twelve),  so  that  the  Academie 
now  consisted  of  about  thirty-five  men.  Among  these, 
it  is  perfectly  true  that  there  existed  many  obscurities  and 
some  obvious  nonentities.  But,  besides  those  whom  we 
have  already  described,  the  names  now  appeared  of  Balzac, 
Maynard,   Gomberville,   Saint-Amant,    Racan,   Vaugelas, 

160 


The  Foundation  of  the  French  Academy 

and  Voiture.  All  these  were  writers  extremely  eminent 
in  the  literature  of  their  own  age,  and  not  one  of  them 
but  is  interesting-  and  distinguished  still.  Not  to  have 
included  them  in  a  French  Academy  would  have  been  a 
grave  and  obvious  errror. 

Some  of  the  accusations  brought  against  the  infant 
Academy  are  absurd.  It  has  been  vilified  for  omitting 
to  make  Moli^re  and  Pascal  original  members;  the  latter 
was  eleven  years  of  age  at  the  time  and  the  former  twelve  ! 
Descartes  was,  of  course,  already  one  of  the  intellectual 
glories  of  France,  but  he  was  a  wanderer  over  the  face 
of  Europe,  and  still  only  known  as  a  writer  in  Latin. 
Arnauld  d'Antilly  was  elected,  but  refused  to  take  his 
place.  Like  Pascal,  Brebeuf  was  still  a  schoolboy.  Pierre 
Corneille,  who  was  very  little  known  in  1634,  and  not  a 
resident  in  Paris,  was  elected  later,  and  so  was  Lamothe 
le  Vayer.  Charles  Sorel,  the  author  of  Francion  and  Le 
Berger  Extravagant,  who  was  historiographer  of  France 
and  a  satirist  of  merit,  was  not  invited  to  join,  it  is  true; 
but  his  caustic  pen  had  spared  no  one,  and  he  was 
essentially  "unclubable."  Scarron  in  1634  was  only  a 
wild  young  buck  about  town.  There  remains  unexplained 
— and  I  confess  there  seems  to  me  to  remain  alone — the 
strange  omission  of  Rotrou,  a  tragic  poet  of  high  distinc- 
tion who  never  formed  part  of  the  French  Academy. 
Since  1632  he  had  been  the  friend  of  Chapelain,  and  the 
Cardinal  was  devoted  to  him.  That  Rotrou 's  duties  as  a 
magistrate  forced  him  to  reside  at  Dreux  is  the  only  reason 
which  I  can  think  of  to  account  for  his  absence  from  the 
list  of  1634.  If  there  was  one  other  representative  man  of 
letters  eligible,  and  yet  omitted  from  that  list,  my  memory 
is  at  fault. 

Among  those  who  were  invited  there  was  one  whose 
support  was  absolutely  essential  to  the  youthful  society. 
It  may  be  said,  without  exaggeration,  that  the  Academie 
Fran^aise  could  not  have  survived  contemporary  ridicule 
if  it  had  failed  to  secure  the  co-operation  of  Jean  Louis 
Guez  de  Balzac.  In  1634  Balzac  was  thirty-seven  years 
of  age  and  by  far  the  most  prominent  man  of  letters  in 

161 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

France.  The  first  volume  of  his  famous  Lcllres — which 
were  not  letters  in  our  sense,  but  chatty  and  yet  elaborate 
essays  on  things  in  general — had  appeared  in  1624,  and 
had  created  what  the  Abb6  d'Olivet  described  as  "a  general 
revolution  among  persons  of  culture."  Balzac  imme- 
diately took  Jiis  place  as  the  official  leader  and  divinity 
of  what  were  afterwards  known  as  the  Pr^cieuses;  but  he 
was  a  great  deal  more  than  that :  he  was  the  enchanting 
artist  of  a  new  French  prose.  "Le  grand  Epistolier  de 
France  "  was  to  French  prose  all,  and  more  than  all,  that 
Malherbe  (who  died  in  1628)  was  to  French  verse. 
Bruneti^re  has  dwelt  on  Balzac's  great  service  to  letters, 
in  the  studied  cultivation  of  harmony  and  lucidity,  order 
and  movement.  His  Lctircs  ushered  in  a  new  epoch  in 
the  production  of  prose,  far  more  sudden  and  obvious 
than  was  brought  about  half  a  century  later,  in  English, 
by  the  Essays  of  Sir  William  Temple,  but  similar  to  that 
in  character.  The  most  agreeable  present  any  man  of 
fashion  could  make  to  his  mistress,  says  Menage,  was  a 
copy  of  Balzac's  book,  and  yet  the  gravest  of  scholars 
was  not  too  learned  to  imitate  its  cadences. 

The  objects  which  the  infant  French  Academy  set 
before  itself  were  the  encouragement  of  grace  and  nobility 
of  style  in  all  persons  employing  the  French  language,  and, 
as  a  corollary  to  this,  the  persistent  efifort  to  raise  that 
language,  in  all  particulars,  until  it  should  become  an  in- 
strument for  expression  as  delicate,  as  forcible  and  as  com- 
prehensive as  Latin  and  Greek  had  been  m  their  palmiest 
hours.  But  these  were  the  very  objects  which  Balzac  had 
first,  and  most  imperiously,  impressed  upon  his  readers, 
and  there  was  a  sense  in  w-hich  it  could  be  said  that  the 
new  body  was  merely  emphasizing  and  extending,  giving 
legislative  authority  to,  ideas  which  were  the  property  of 
Balzac.  It  was  therefore  obvious  that  whosoever  was 
made  an  original  member,  the  "grand  Epistolier  "  should 
not  be  missing.  This  was  obvious  to  the  wise  Boisrobert, 
of  whom  Balzac  himself  amusingly  said  that  he  was  "cir- 
comspectissime  "  in  the  smallest  actions  of  his  life.  As 
early  as  March  13,   1634,  and  therefore  in  all  probability 

162 


The  Foundation  of  the  French  Academy 

before  anyone  else  was  approached,  Boisrobert  took  care 
that  Balzac  was  invited  to  join  the  new  Academic. 

But  it  was  one  thing  to  whistle  to  Balzac,  and  quite 
another  for  him  to  come  at  the  call.  His  character  was  not 
an  agreeable  one;  he  was  excessively  proud,  painfully  shy, 
quivering  with  self-consciousness,  ever  ready  to  take 
ofifence.  Tallemant  des  Reaux,  putting  the  universal 
opinion  into  an  epigram,  said  that  if  ever  there  was  an 
animal  glorice  it  was  Balzac.  He  was  a  finished  hypo- 
chondriac, with  his  finger  ever  on  his  own  pulse;  before 
he  was  thirty  he  described  himself  as  more  battered  than  a 
ship  that  has  sailed  three  times  to  the  Indies.  He  was  a 
hermit,  hating  society,  and  scarcely  ever  leaving  that 
garden  of  amber  and  musk  within  the  walls  of  his  castle  of 
Balzac  which  hung  above  the  mingling  waters  of  the 
Charente  and  the  Touvre.  But  Balzac,  whose  character 
and  temperament  had  many  points  of  likeness  to  those  of 
Pope,  knew  the  value  of  friendship,  though  he  was  capable 
of  amazing  disloyalty  under  the  pressure  of  vanity. 
Conrart,  Boisrobert,  Chapelain,  and  even  perhaps  the 
magnificent  Cardinal  himself — for  there  is  talk  of  a 
pension — brought  simultaneous  pressure  to  bear,  and 
Balzac  consented  to  let  his  name  appear  in  the  list  of 
original  members  of  the  Academie.  This  did  not  induce 
in  him  much  zeal  for  the  works  or  deeds  of  his  nominal 
colleagues,  upon  whom,  from  his  far-away  garden-terraces, 
he  looked  down  with  great  contempt.  Still,  the  Academie 
Frangaise  was  in  existence,  for  Balzac  was  of  the  number. 

Among  the  other  original  members,  Voiture  and 
Gomberville,  the  author  of  Polexandre,  have  never  lost 
their  little  place  in  the  crowded  history  of  French  literature. 
Saint-Amant  and  Maynard,  who  sank  out  of  sight  for  a 
long  time,  are  now  regarded  with  more  honour  than  ever 
before  since  their  death.  Honorat  de  Beuil,  Marquis  de 
Racan,  is  one  of  the  minor  classics  of  his  country.  A 
dreamy,  blundering  man,  innocent  and  vague,  his  whole 
outtook  upon  life  was  that  of  a  pastoral  poet.  He  had 
"no  common  sense,"  we  are  told,  but  walked  in  a  cloud 
conducting  an  imaginary  flock  and  murmuring  his  beauti- 

163 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

ful  Virgilian  verses.  Racan  took  the  Academy  more 
seriously  than  any  other  member;  he  never  missed  a 
sitting.  But  he  could  not  be  depended  on.  Once,  the 
Academy  met  to  listen  to  an  address  by  the  Marquis  de 
Racan,  who  entered,  holding  one  torn  sheet  of  paper  in  his 
hand.  "Gentlemen,"  he  said,  "I  was  bringing  you  my 
oration,  but  my  great  greyhound  has  chewed  it  up.  Here 
it  is  !  Make  what  you  can  of  it,  for  I  don't  know  it  by 
heart,  and  I  have  no  copy."  The  story  of  how  old  Mile,  de 
Gournay  was  gulled  by  successive  impostors  who  pre- 
tended to  be  Racan,  and  then  at  length  spurned  the  real 
poet,  as  an  obvious  idiot,  is  too  long  to  be  told  here  in 
detail.  At  the  close  of  his  life,  Racan  had  allowed  himself 
to  retain  no  friends  except  his  fellow  academicians,  so 
completely  had  he  become  absorbed  in  the  Academie. 

These  illustrious  names,  however,  are  not  sufficient  to 
prevent  the  eye  which  runs  down  the  list  of  original 
members  from  being  startled  by  the  obscurity  of  at  least 
half  the  names.  It  must  be  remembered  that  in  1635  it 
was  no  envied  distinction  or  disputed  honour  to  form  part 
of  this  new  and  untried  corporation.  The  labours  of  the 
academicians  were  disinterested,  for  the  Academie  was  not 
yet  endowed,  and  there  was  little  or  no  reward  offered, 
besides  the  favour  of  the  Cardinal,  for  the  zealous  labours 
of  scholarship.  Moreover,  it  was  necessary  to  silence  op- 
position and  disarm  ridicule.  The  general  feeling  of  the 
public,  as  reflected  in  the  action  of  parliament,  was  hostile. 
Louis  XIII  himself,  although  he  had  passed  the  Letters 
Patent,  was  far  from  favourable  to  his  Minister's  literary 
project,  as  we  learn  from  a  letter  of  Chapelain.  But  Riche- 
lieu was  passionately  bent  on  its  success,  and  we  see  from 
Tallemant  that  whenever  the  Acad6mie  made  a  step  in 
advance,  the  Cardinal  was  at  no  pains  to  conceal  his  lively 
satisfaction.  But  there  were  more  seats  than  eminent  men 
of  letters  to  fill  them,  and  consequently  almost  anyone  who 
would  consent  or  could  be  inveigled  was  elected.  Scarron 
says  the  only  thing  that  some  of  the  original  Immortals 
were  fit  for  was  to  snuff  candles  or  to  sweep  the  floor. 
There  was  a  class  of  academicians  who  were  styled  "the 

164 


The  Foundation  of  the  French  Academy 

children  of  the  pity  of  Boisrobert,"  because  the  "plaisant 
abbe,"  in  filling  up  the  fauteuils,  was  merciful  to  needy 
men  of  letters  without  talent,  and  fetched  them  in  so  that 
they  might  eat  a  piece  of  bread.  They  were  buoyed  up 
with  the  hope  that  Richelieu  would  bring  in  an  age  of  gold 
for  scribblers. 

But  another  element  must  not  be  forgotten.  There  was 
a  great  temptation  to  turn  poachers  into  gamekeepers,  and 
a  certain  number  of  the  original  members  of  the  Academic 
Fran9aise  were  wits  whose  bitterness  Richelieu  himself,  or 
Chapelain,  or  Boisrobert,  dreaded.  Maynard  was  one  of 
these,  but  perhaps  the  most  curious  example  was  a  man 
called  Bautru.  He  was  no  writer,  for  one  scurrilous  piece 
in  the  Cabinet  Satirique  represents  his  complete  works. 
But  he  was  a  savage  practical  joker,  whose  tongue  was 
universally  dreaded.  His  wit  seems  to  have  been  ready. 
He  was  a  "libertine  "  in  the  sense  of  that  day,  and  openly 
irreligious.  One  day,  he  was  caught  taking  his  hat  off 
to  a  crucifix  as  he  passed  in  the  street.  "Ah  !  then,"  said 
his  friends,  "you  are  on  better  terms  with  God  than  we 
supposed?  "  "On  bowing  terms;  we  don't  speak,"  Bautru 
replied.  In  1642,  he  called  our  Charles  I  "a  calf  led  from 
market  to  market ;  and  presently  they  will  take  him  to  the 
shambles,"  he  prophetically  added.  His  was  an  evil  tongue 
with  a  sharp  edge  to  it,  which  it  was  safest  to  have  inside 
the  Academic,  and  there  were  others  of  the  same  sort 
among  the  false  celebrities,  les  passe-volans  or  dummies, 
whose  presence  in  the  original  list  is  at  first  so  discon- 
certing. 

In  order  to  give  dignity  and  discipline  to  their  assem- 
blies, the  Academicians  now  created  three  offices,  those  of 
Director,  Chancellor,  and  Perpetual  Secretary;  these  were 
held  by  Serisay,  Desmarets,  and  Conrart  respectively. 
They  appointed  the  famous  printer,  Jean  Camusat,  their 
librarian  and  typographer,  meeting  sometimes  at  his  house 
for  easier  correction  of  the  press.  On  the  20th  of  March, 
1634,  they  settled  on  their  all-important  name,  and  thence- 
forth were  to  the  world  "I'Acadcimie  fran^oise."  Two 
days  later,  in  a  very  long  letter,  they  detailed  to  the 
L  16^ 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

Cardinal  the  objects  and  functions  of  their  body,  not  fail- 
ing to  begin  with  the  request  that  he  would  permit  them 
to  publish  his  own  tragedies  and  pastorals.  This  docu- 
ment is  very  interesting  to-day.  In  it  the  new  Academy 
proposes  to  cleanse  the  French  language  from  all  the  ordure 
which  it  has  contracted  from  vulgar  and  ignorant  usage; 
to  establish  the  exact  sense  of  words;  seriously  to  examine 
the  subject  and  treatment  of  prose,  the  style  of  the  whole, 
the  harmony  of  periods,  the  propriety  in  the  use  of  words. 
Moreover,  the  Academicians  undertook  to  examine  the 
books  of  one  another  with  a  meticulous  attention  to  faults 
of  style  and  grammar.  This  "Projet,"  which  was  drafted 
by  Faret,  was  submitted  to  Richelieu,  and  printed  in  an 
edition  of  thirty  copies,  in  May,  1634. 

In  this  first  manifesto,  which  was  kept  extremely  secret, 
nothing  was  said  about  the  plan  of  a  Dictionary.  But 
Chapelain's  heart  had  been  set  upon  that  from  the  first, 
and  he  did  not  forget  to  bring  it  forward.  He  insisted, 
in  season  and  out  of  season,  on  the  necessity  of  labouring 
in  unison  "for  the  purity  of  our  language  and  for  its 
capacity  to  develop  the  loftiest  eloquence."  On  the  27th  of 
March  he  brought  forward  his  idea  of  a  Dictionary.  Balzac 
supported  him  by  letter,  Vaugelas  offered  his  invaluable 
grammatical  services,  and  at  last  the  Academy  so  far 
accepted  the  idea  as  to  instruct  Chapelain  and  Vaugelas  to 
report  on  the  subject.  But  this  was  not  until  1637,  so 
that  we  must  realize  that  the  French  Academy  had  existed 
three  years  before  it  finally  settled  down  to  the  work  with 
which  its  early  existence  is  most  popularly  identified.  But 
for  the  persistency  of  Chapelain  this  might  never  have  been 
commenced. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  Academicians  were  very  busily 
engaged  over  their  statutes,  which  were  drawn  up  by  one 
of  the  latest  of  the  original  members,  Hay  du  Chastelet,  a 
learned  lawyer  of  high  repute.  They  were  passed  and 
accepted  by  the  Cardinal,  before  the  close  of  1634.  It  was, 
very  properly,  Conrart  himself  who  drafted  the  Letters 
Patent,  a  very  long  and  dignified  document,  which  Louis 
XIII  signed  in  Paris  on  the  29th  of  January,  1635.     But 

166 


The  Foundation  of  the  French  Academy 

now  came  the  first  difficulty  which  beset  the  primrose  path 
of  the  young  Academie.  It  was  not  enough  for  the  King 
to  sign  the  Letters  Patent;  they  had  to  be  verifies  by 
Parliament;  and  this  was  not  done  until  the  loth  of  July, 
1637.  There  has  been  much  discussion  as  to  the  cause  of 
this  delay,  which  was  intensely  irksome  to  the  Cardinal 
and  threatened  the  existence  of  the  infant  association.  It 
was  early  thought  that  the  Parliament  suspected  Richelieu 
of  having  a  design  in  creating  the  Academie  which  was 
much  more  directly  political  than  appeared  on  the  surface. 
If  so,  the  placid  and  modest  demeanour  of  the  Academi- 
cians ultimately  disarmed  hostility,  and  they  obtained  their 
Letters  Patent. 

At  this  point  we  must  draw  our  inquiry  to  a  close,  since 
the  foundation  of  the  Academie  Fran^aise  was  completed 
by  this  action  on  the  part  of  the  Parliament.  It  will  be 
seen  that  eight  years  had  gone  by  since  the  first  meetings 
of  selected  men  of  letters  had  taken  place  in  Conrart's 
house,  and  that  many  tedious  formalities  had  to  be  com- 
pleted before  the  body  was  in  a  position  even  to  begin  its 
work.  The  humble  nature  of  the  origin  of  the  Academie 
Frangaise,  the  surprising  and  painful  adventures  of  its 
youth,  and  the  glories  of  its  subsequent  existence,  should 
make  us  indulgent  to  the  slow  growth  of  any  similar  institu- 
tion. Rome  is  not  the  only  corporation  which  was  not 
built  in  a  day. 


167 


ROUSSEAU  IN  ENGLAND  IN  THE 
NINETEENTH  CENTURY 

BURKE,  in  his  Reflections  on  the  Revolution  in 
I  France  (1790),  although  he  called  Rousseau  an 
"eccentric  observer  of  human  nature,"  had  not 
attempted  to  deny  his  penetration.  He  wrote  of  him, 
already  without  sympathy,  as  one  who  for  the  sake  of 
playing  upon  that  love  of  the  marvellous  which  is  inherent 
in  man,  desired  extraordinary  situations,  "giving  rise  to 
new  and  unlooked-for  strokes  in  politics  and  morals." 
But  he  gave  the  Genevese  philosopher  credit  for  nothing 
worse  than  levity ;  he  had  raised  up  political  and  social  para- 
doxes in  the  spirit  in  which  a  story-teller,  eager  to  arouse 
the  attention  of  an  idle  audience,  evokes  giants  and  fairies 
to  satisfy  the  credulity  of  his  hearers.  And  Burke  has  the 
indulgence  to  admit  that,  "  I  believe,  were  Rousseau  alive, 
and  in  one  of  his  lucid  intervals,  he  would  be  shocked  at 
the  fanatical  frenzy  of  his  scholars,  who  .  .  .  are  servile 
imitators;  and  even  in  their  incredulity  discover  an  implicit 
faith." 

But  when  events  had  rapidly  developed,  and  Burke 
came  to  write  the  flaming  sentences  of  his  great  Letter 
to  a  Member  of  the  National  Assembly  (1791),  the  import- 
ance of  Rousseau's  influence  in  bringing  about  the  events 
which  Burke  so  passionately  deplored  had  greatly  widened 
and  deepened.  He  saw  that  the  very  blood  of  Rousseau 
had  been  transfused  into  the  veins  of  the  National 
Assembly  of  France.  "Him  they  study,"  he  wrote,  "him 
they  meditate ;  him  they  turn  over  in  all  the  time  they  can 
spare  from  the  laborious  mischief  of  the  day,  or  the 
debauches  of  the  night.  Rousseau  is  their  canon  of  holy 
writ;  in  his  life  he  is  their  canon  of  Polyclitus ;  he  is  their 

169 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

standard  figure  of  perfedion."  Burke  felt  obliged  to  de- 
nounce, with  his  unparalleled  wealth  of  picturesque  elo- 
quence, the  fatal  character  of  the  fascination  exercised 
by  the  author  of  the  Lettres  de  la  Montague  and  the 
Confessions. 

To  Burke,  thus  brought  face  to  face  with  what  he  be- 
lieved to  be  the  very  Ragnarok  of  the  gods,  the  ruin  of  all 
whicli  made  life  in  Europe  worth  living,  it  now  became  a 
religious  duty  to  expose  the  malefic  character  of  the  charm- 
ing, exquisite  pleadings  of  the  revolutionary  of  Geneva. 
He  declared  that  the  virtue  propounded  by  Rousseau  was 
not  virtue  at  all,  but  "a  selfish,  flattering,  seductive,  osten- 
tatious vice."  This  was  a  theory  new  to  Englishmen,  a 
theory  which  had,  of  course,  in  faltering  accents,  been 
here  and  there  suggested  by  opponents,  but  never  before 
deliberately  and  logically  asserted  by  a  great  master  of 
English  oratory.  Burke  spoke,  not  merely  with  the  im- 
mense prestige  of  his  position,  but  as  one  who  had  been 
subjected  to  the  personal  charm  of  Rousseau,  and  who  had 
studied  him  in  his  lifetime,  not  merely  without  prejudice, 
but  with  sympathy  and  admiration.  His  grave  censure 
of  the  philosopher  came  with  unction  from  the  lips  of  one 
who  was  known  to  have  been  in  communication  with  him, 
during  his  first  visit  to  London,  almost  from  day  to  day.* 
Burke  spoke  with  authority  to  a  large  section  of  the  public 
when  he  stated  that  he  had  gradually  become  persuaded 
that  Rousseau  "entertained  no  principle  either  to  guide 
his  heart,  or  to  guide  his  understanding,  but  vanity."  He 
did  not  deny  the  charm  of  Rousseau's  writing,  or  pretend 
to  depreciate  his  incomparable  talents,  but  he  pronounced 
him  to  be  deranged  and  eccentric,  and  to  have  gloried  in 
the  illumination  of  the  obscure  and  vulgar  vices.  He  de- 
scribed the  Confessions,  over  which  the  English  world  had 
bowed  in  transports  of  emotional  adulation,  as  the  record 
of  "a  life  that,  with  wild  defiance,  he  flings  in  the  face  of 
his  Creator."     Violence  carried  Burke  so  far  as  to  describe 

1  By  far  the  best  account  of  Rousseau's  visit  to  England  is  contained 
in  Le  Sijour  de  /.  /.  Rousseau  en  Anglelerre  (1766-1767),  published  from 
original  documents  by  M.  Louis  J.  Courtois  (A.  Jullian,  Geneve,  191 1). 

170 


Rousseau  in  England  in  the   19th  Century 

Rousseau  as  a  man,  by  his  own  account,  without  a  single 
virtue.  There  can  be  no  question  that  this  diatribe, 
prominently  brought  forward  by  the  first  of  EngHsh 
orators,  in  a  work  which  was  read  by  every  educated 
man  in  Great  Britain,  sapped  the  reputation  of 
Rousseau  amongst  our  countrymen,  and  led  to  the 
gradual  decline  of  his  fame  in  England  all  down  the 
nineteenth  century. 

The  attack  on  Rousseau,  contained  in  many  fulminating 
pages  of  the  Letter  to  a  Member  of  the  National  Assembly, 
is  extravagant  and  unjust.  We  read  it  now  with  a  certain 
indignation,  tempered  by  a  mild  amusement.  It  should 
have  been  injured  by  its  absurd  denunciation  of  French- 
men and  of  the  French  nation,  in  whom  Burke  saw  little 
but  a  furious  congeries  of  dancing-masters,  fiddlers,  and 
•valets-de-chambre.  But  there  were  already  in  England, 
in  the  reaction  of  terror  brought  about  by  the  French 
Revolution,  many  who  were  delighted  to  accept  this 
grotesque  perversion  of  the  truth,  and  Burke,  with  all  his 
powers  of  speech,  all  his  knowledge  of  his  countrymen, 
knew  how  to  play  upon  the  alarms  and  the  ignorances  of 
the  English.  He  had,  at  all  events,  the  dangerous  gift  of 
unqualified  statement,  and  when  he  solemnly  declared,  as 
if  by  reluctant  conviction,  that  "the  writings  of  Rousseau 
lead  directly  to  shameful  evil  "  both  in  theory  and  practice, 
there  were  thousands  only  too  ready  to  accept  the 
warning. 

We  may  observe,  too,  that  Burke  was  the  earliest  Eng- 
lish critic  of  weight  who  suggested  that  the  exquisite 
literary  art  of  Rousseau  had  its  limitations.  His  remarks 
are  worthy  of  being  quoted  at  length,  since  they  contain 
the  germ  of  the  English  attitude  through  the  whole  of  the 
nineteenth  century  :  — 

I  have  often  wondered  how  he  comes  to  be  so  much  more 
admired  and  followed  on  the  Continent  than  he  is  here.  Per- 
haps a  secret  charm  in  the  language  may  have  its  share  in 
this  extraordinary  difference.  We  certainly  perceive,  and  to 
a  degree  we  feel,  in  this  writer,  a  style  glowing,  animated, 
enthusiastic;  at  the  s.ame  time  that  we  find  it  lax,  diffuse,  and 

171 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

not  in  the  best  taste  of  composition ;  all  the  members  of  the 
piece  being-  pretty  equally  laboured  and  expended,  without  any 
due  selection  or  subordination  of  parts.  He  is  generally  too 
nuichi  on  the  stretch,  and  his  manner  has  little  variety.  We 
cannot  rest  upon  any  of  his  works,  though  they  contain 
observations  which  occasionally  discover  a  considerable  insig^ht 
into  human  nature. 

The  attacks  of  Burke  upon  their  idol  were  not  accepted 
tamely  by  the  Whigs,  or  by  the  Radical  wing  of  their 
party,  which  included  most  of  the  intellectual  men  of  the 
time.  It  was  recognized  that  Burke  spoke  with  excessive 
violence,  and  that  his  emotion  was  largely  provoked  by 
political  apprehensions  which  were  not  shared  by  the  more 
enlightened  of  his  countrymen.  It  was  easily  pointed  out 
that  the  great  orator's  objection  to  Rousseau  was  founded 
on  a  predilection  for  aristocracy,  a  dread  of  innovation, 
an  abhorrence  for  abstract  politics,  rather  than  on  a  serious 
and  philosophical  consideration  of  Rousseau's  contribu- 
tions to  literature.  There  were  many  indignant  replies  to 
his  denunciation,  the  most  effective  being  those  contained 
in  Sir  James  Mackintosh's  famous  VindicicB  Gallicce. 
Mackintosh,  with  less  eloquence  but  far  more  knowledge, 
denied  the  responsibility  of  Rousseau  for  the  excesses  of 
the  Revolution,  and  suggested  that  Burke  had  not  made 
himself  acquainted  with  the  Contrat  Social.  Rousseau  was 
vindicated  as  one  of  the  immortal  band  of  sages  "who  un- 
shackled and  emancipated  the  human  mind,"  and  he  was 
assured  a  place  in  eternal  glory,  by  the  side  of  Locke  and 
Franklin. 

All  that  was  generous,  all  that  was  enthusiastic  in  Eng- 
lish opinion,  was  still  marshalled  on  the  side  of  Rousseau, 
but  Burke's  measured  attack,  so  universally  considered, 
was  the  gradual  cause  of  an  ever-increasing  defection.  For 
the  time  being,  however,  this  was  confined  to  the  more 
timid  and  the  less  intelligent  part  of  the  community. 
Burke  had  assailed  in  Rousseau  the  politician  and  the 
moralist,  but  although  it  was  evident  that  he  was  out  of 
sympathy  with  the  imaginative  writer,  his  diatribe  did 
little  at  first  to  weaken  the  spell  of  the  sentimental  and 

172 


Rousseau  in  England  in  the   19th  Century 

literary  writings.  There  was  no  sign,  in  1800,  that  the 
Nouvelle  Hclo'ise  had  lost  its  magic  for  English  readers, 
though  it  may  be  doubted  whether  these  were  so  numerous 
as  they  had  been  twenty  years  earlier.  The  famous 
romance  had  been  the  direct  precursor  of  the  school  of 
romantic-sentimental  novels  in  England,  but  it  would  take 
us  too  far  back  to  consider  in  any  detail  its  influence  on 
Holcroft,  whose  Hugh  Trevor  dates  from  1797;  on  Bage, 
in  such  romances  as  Hermsprong  (1796);  on  Mrs.  Inch- 
bold,  in  Nature  and  Art  (1796);  and  on  Charlotte  Smith. 
But  it  must  be  remembered  that  these  popular  novelists 
lived  well  on  into  the  nineteenth  century,  and  that  their 
romances  were  still  widely  read,  and  by  advanced  thinkers 
warmly  accepted,  long  after  our  period  begins.  Moreover, 
in  William  Godwin  (1756-1836),  once  known  as  "the  im- 
mortal Godwin,"  we  have  the  most  pronounced  type  in 
English  literature  of  the  novelist  started  and  supported  by 
a  devotion  to  the  principles  of  Rousseau.  Caleb  Williams 
(1794)  is  still  a  minor  English  classic,  and  Fleetwood  (1804) 
is  an  example  of  a  Rousseau  novel  actually  written  within 
the  confines  of  our  century.  But  with  these  names  the  list 
of  the  novelists  directly  inspired  by  the  Nouvelle  Helo'ise, 
and  in  a  much  lesser  degree  by  Emile,  practically  ceases, 
and  the  advent  of  Walter  Scott  gave  them  their  coup  de 
grace. 

The  excessive  admiration  of  Englishmen  for  the 
imaginative  writings  of  Rousseau  was  already  on  the 
wane,  or  rather  it  was  beginning  to  be  old-fashioned. 
That  very  remarkable  work.  The  Diary  of  a  Lover  of 
Literature,  by  Thomas  Green  (1769-1825),  gives  us  a  valu- 
able insight  into  the  critical  opinions  of  the  opening  years 
of  the  nineteenth  century.  It  was  published  in  1810,  but 
it  reflects  the  feeling  of  a  slightly  earlier  time.  It  repre- 
sents the  views  of  an  independent  and  transitional  thinker, 
remote  from  all  the  literary  cliques,  who  read  extensively 
in  his  hermitage  at  Ipswich,  and  it  mirrors  the  mind  of 
the  average  educated  Englishman  between  1795  and  1805. 
We  discover  that  there  were  persons  of  cultivation  in 
England  at  that  time  who  did  not  hesitate  deliberately  to 

^73 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

pronounce  that  Rousseau  was,  "without  exception,  the 
greatest  genius  and  the  finest  writer  that  ever  Hved."  This 
opinion  the  judicious  Green  is  by  no  means  able  to  endorse ; 
but  he  makes  a  very  curious  confession  which  throws  a 
strong  light  on  the  best  EngHsh  opinion  in  1800.  The 
Lover  of  Literature  says  that  Rousseau  is  a  character  "who 
has  by  turns  transported  me  with  the  most  violent  and 
opposite  emotions  of  delight  and  disgust,  admiration  and 
contempt,  indignation  and  pity."  He  points  out,  with 
great  acumen,  the  peculiar  conditions  of  Rousseau's  "dis- 
tempered sensibility,"  and  says  that  his  wrath  against  evil- 
doing  burns  "in  consuming  fire."  Green's  analysis  of 
Rousseau's  genius  is  very  ingenious  and  glowing,  but 
he  sees  spots  in  the  sun,  and  thus,  at  the  immediate 
opening  of  the  new  century,  we  meet  with  high  critical 
commendation,  but  also  with  the  faint  beginnings  of 
reproof. 

It  is  necessary  to  note  that  the  earliest  objections  made 
to  Rousseau's  influence  by  Englishmen  were  political. 
They  were  not  directed  against  the  Nouvelle  Helo'ise,  nor 
Emile,  nor  the  Confessions,  but  against  the  Contrat  Social. 
The  name  of  Rousseau  was  used,  in  connexion  with  this 
work,  to  justify  the  horrors  of  the  French  Revolution,  the 
jacqueries,  the  September  massacres.  vSerious  English 
people,  whom  Burke  had  originally  awakened  to  suspicion, 
became  more  and  more  persuaded  that  it  was  the  doctrine 
of  Rousseau  which  had  conducted  Louis  XVI  to  the  scaf- 
fold. The  book  itself  was  never  much  read  in  England, 
but  it  formed  part  of  a  tradition.  It  was  understood  to 
have  consecrated  the  violent  acts  of  the  Revolution,  and 
English  people  began  to  shrink  from  a  name  so  tainted 
with  blood.  This  view  found  a  striking  exponent  in  the 
opening  number  of  the  Edinburgh  Review,  where  Jeffrey, 
reviewing  Monnier's  Influence  attribuee  aux  Philosophes, 
warned  his  readers  with  earnest  unction  against  "the  pre- 
sumptuous and  audacious  maxims  "  of  Rousseau,  which 
had  a  natural  tendency  to  do  harm.  The  arguments  of 
the  Contrat  Social  were  exposed  by  the  Whig  critic  as 
unsettling  the  foundations  of  political  duty,  and  as  teaching 

174 


Rousseau  in  England  in  the  19th  Century 

the  citizens  of  every  established  Government  that  they  were 
enslaved,  and  had  the  power  of  being  free.  Whatever 
influence  Rousseau  still  had,  and  in  1802  it  was  already 
waning,  the  Edinburgh  Review  solemnly  declared  to  be 
"unquestionably  pernicious." 

By  English  politicians  of  the  Tory  type,  Rousseau  was 
now  regarded  with  growing  suspicion.  They  looked  back 
to  first  causes,  and  found  him  at  the  end  of  the  vista. 
They  blamed  him  all  the  more  because  they  still  lay  under 
the  spell  of  his  style  and  his  sentiment.  He  was  beginning 
to  be  regarded  with  more  disapproval  than  other  and  more 
definitely  revolutionary  philosophers,  than  Condorcet,  for 
instance,  as  being  more  presumptuous  and  less  logical, 
more  "improvident,"  to  use  the  expression  of  an  early 
English  critic.  There  was  no  considerable  desire  in  Eng- 
land for  the  subversion  of  monarchy,  and  it  was  only  in 
countries  where  there  was  a  wish  to  believe  that  kings  were 
toppling  from  their  thrones  that  the  political  writings  of 
the  arch-firebrand  could  expect  to  find  a  welcome.  All 
such  speculation  had  been  pleasant  enough  before  the  great 
revolution  set  in  in  France,  but  England,  thrilled  for  a 
moment  by  Quixotic  hopes,  had  turned  into  another  path, 
where  Rousseau  had  not  led  her,  nor  could  ever  be  her 
companion.  He  appeared  as  a  demagogue  and  a  disturber 
of  the  public  peace,  as  an  apostle  of  change  and  crisis  and 
unrest.  In  England  everyone,  or  almost  everyone,  craved 
a  respite  from  such  ideas,  and  his  prestige  began  to  sink. 
Let  us  note,  then,  that  beyond  question  the  earliest  objec- 
tion to  Rousseau  came  from  the  political  side. 

The  personal  character  of  the  Genevese  philosopher  was 
still  little  known.  It  was  revealed,  in  certain  unfavourable 
aspects,  by  several  collections  of  memoirs,  which  now 
began  to  be  published.  Those  of  Marmontel,  in  1805, 
were  widely  read  in  England,  and  were  recommended  to 
a  large  circle  of  readers  by  Jeffrey  in  a  famous  essay.  The 
anecdotes,  so  amusing  and  often  so  piquant,  appeared  to 
the  Scotch  critic  and  to  his  British  audience  more  dis- 
creditable than  Marmontel,  who  belonged  to  an  earlier  and 
looser  generation,  had  intended  them  to  seem.     From  1805 

175 


Aspects  and   Impressions 

began  to  arise  in  England  the  conception  of  a  Rousseau 
full  of  cruel  vanity,  implacable,  calumnious,  and  wholly 
wanting  in  that  frankness  and  bluff  candour  upon  which 
John  Bull  delights  to  pride  himself.  But  the  splendour  of 
his  writings  was  still  uncontested.  In  1809,  the  Edinburgh 
Review  said  of  the  Contrat  Social  that  "it  contains  some 
deep  observations,  and  many  brilliant  and  elevated 
thoughts,  along  with  a  good  deal,  we  admit,  of  impractic- 
able and  very  questionable  theory."  The  Confessions  was 
not  much  read,  but  the  precise  Jeffrey  did  not  hesitate  to 
recommend  it,  in  1806,  as  in  some  respects  the  most  inter- 
esting of  books,  and  in  1807  Capel  Lofft  declared,  "If  I 
had  five  millions  of  years  to  live  upon  the  earth,  I  would 
read  Rousseau  daily  with  increasing  delight." 

It  would  take  us  too  far  to  consider  how  the  sentimental 
Pantisocracy  of  the  youthful  Lake  Poets  coincided  with 
the  direct  influence  of  Rousseau.  That  movement,  more- 
over, belongs  to  the  eighteenth,  not  the  nineteenth  century, 
since  it  was  all  over  by  1794.  But  so  far  as  it  w^as  an  out- 
come of  the  teaching  of  Rousseau,  the  reaction  which  fol- 
lowed it  was  not  favourable  to  the  prestige  of  works  which 
now  came  to  seem  almost  hateful  to  the  Lake  Poets. 
Wordsworth  branched  away  irrevocably,  and  his  account 
of  the  Saturnian  Reign  in  The  Excursion  (finished  in 
1805)  would  have  given  little  satisfaction  to  Rousseau. 
Southey  was  early,  and  permanently,  disgusted  with  him- 
self for  having  supposed  that  the  millennium  would  be 
ushered  in  from  Geneva.  But  perhaps  the  best  example 
of  the  revulsion  of  opinion  which  followed  the  juvenile 
raptures  of  the  Lake  Poets  is  to  be  found  in  the  pages  of 
The  Friend  (1809-10),  where  Coleridge  derides 

Rousseau,  the  dreamer  of  love-sick  tales,  and  the  spinner 
of  speculative  cobwebs;  shy  of  light  as  the  mole,  but  quick- 
eared,  too,  for  every  whisper  of  the  public  opinion ;  the  teacher 
of  stoic  pride  in  his  principles,  yet  the  victim  of  morbid  vanity 
in  his  feelings  and  conduct. 

Yet  this  was  premature,  as  an  expression  of  general 
critical    disapprobation.     In    November,    1809,    the    high 

176 


Rousseau  in  England  in  the   19th  Century 

Tory  organ,  the  Quarterly  Review,^  spoke,  without  a  shade 
of  disapproval,  of  "the  tremendous  fidelity  "  of  the  picture 
of  life  in  the  Confessions.  In  1812,  the  same  severe 
periodical,  then  forming  the  most  dreaded  tribunal  of 
British  intellectual  taste,  devoted  several  pages  to  an 
examination  of  the  moral  character  of  Rousseau,  and  the 
result  was  by  no  means  unfavourable.  The  writer  was 
John  Herman  Merivale  (1779-1844),  who  declared  that 
"Rousseau's  system  of  morality  is  as  little  practicable  as 
would  be  a  system  of  politics  invented  by  one  who  had 
always  lived  in  a  state  of  savage  independence,"  and  sug- 
gested, but  without  bitterness,  that  portions  of  the  Nouvelle 
Helo'ise  betrayed  "a  certain  lack  of  just  moral  taste  and 
feeling."  The  Confessions  are  described  in  faltering  terms 
which  suggest  that  Merivale  had  not  read  them  with  any 
attention.  On  the  whole,  we  find,  up  to  this  point,  no 
difference  between  the  views  of  Englishmen  and  of 
similarly  placed  Frenchmen.  Even  Shelley,  in  his 
Proposals  for  an  Association  (1812),  blames  the  tendency 
of  some  of  Rousseau's  political  writings  in  exactly  the 
conventional  Continental  tone. 

But  a  brief  and  limited,  though  splendid  revival  was 
now  approaching,  the  last  which  the  reputation  of 
Rousseau  was  to  enjoy  in  England.  We  must  note  the 
sphere  within  which  this  esoteric  celebration  of  his  genius 
was  confined;  it  was  not  an  explosion  of  national  enthu- 
siasm, but  the  defiant  glorification  of  a  power  which  had 
already  begun  to  decline;  it  was  not  a  general  expression 
of  approval,  but  the  effort  of  a  group  of  revolutionaries. 
It  was  roused,  no  doubt,  by  the  attitude  of  the  official  critics 
who  were  affecting  to  think  that  the  influence  of  Rousseau 
was  exploded.  The  Quarterly  had  said  in  1813,  "As  it  is 
probable  that  we  may  not  soon  be  again  in  the  company 
of  this  extraordinary  man,  we  would  willingly  take  leave 
of  him  in  good  humour,"  and  though  it  was  quite  unable 
to  keep  up  this  attitude  of  dignified  dismissal,  and  returned 

^  The  writer,  as  I  am  courteously  informed  by  the  present  editor  of 
the  Quarterly  Review,  was  James  Pillans  (1778-1864),  the  Scottish  educa- 
tional reformer,  the  "  paltry  Pillans  "  of  Byron's  satire  in  English  Bards 
and  Scottish  Reviewers. 

177 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

to  the  attack  in  April,  1814,  nevertheless  that  was  the  lone 
adopted  towards  Rousseau,  as  of  a  man  played  out,  and 
rapidly  beinj:^  forgotten. 

The  publication  of  the  voluminous  Correspondence  of 
Grimm,  which  was  much  read  in  England,  led  Englishmen 
to  review  the  subject  of  the  character  and  writings  of 
Rousseau,  and  in  the  remarks  which  contemporaries  made 
in  1813  and  1814  we  may  trace  a  rapid  cooling  of  their 
enthusiasm.  The  scorn  of  all  French  habits  of  thought 
and  conduct,  which  immediately  succeeded  the  anxious  and 
wearisome  period  of  the  Napoleonic  wars,  makes  itself 
particularly  felt  in  the  English  attitude  towards  Rousseau, 
who  was  regarded  as  the  source  from  which  all  the  revolu- 
tionary sorrows  of  Europe  had  directly  proceeded.  The 
Quarterly  Review  for  April,  1814,  pronounced  a  judgment 
upon  Rousseau,  of  which  a  portion  must  be  quoted  here, 
since  it  may  be  considered  as  the  original  indictment,  the 
document  which  served  to  start  the  unfavourable  opinion 
which  now  became  more  and  more  that  which  sober  and 
conservative  Englishmen  were  to  adopt  during  the  next 
fifty  years.  The  opening  lines  give  a  new  warning,  which 
was  to  gain  more  and  more  in  emphasis,  while  the  end 
repeats  praise  which  was  conventional  in  1814,  but  was 
already  fading,  and  was  soon  to  disappear. 

It  says  :  — 

A  writer  who  professes  to  instruct  mankind  is  bound  to 
deliver  precepts  of  morality.  But  it  is  by  inflaming  the 
passions,  and  by  blotting  out  the  line  which  separates  virtue 
from  vice,  that  Rousseau  undertakes  to  teach  young  ladies  to 
be  chaste,  and  young  men  to  respect  the  rights  of  hospitality. 
His  heroine,  indeed,  in  conformity  to  his  own  example,  is 
always  prating  about  virtue,  even  at  the  time  when  she  de- 
viates most  essentially  from  its  precepts ;  but  to  dogmatize  is 
not  to  be  innocent.  Yet,  with  all  its  defects,  there  are 
numerous  passages  in  this  celebrated  work  which  astonish  by 
their  eloquence.  Language,  perhaps,  never  painted  the  con- 
flicts of  love  in  colours  more  animated  and  captivating  than 
in  the  letter  written  by  St.  Preux  when  wandering  among  the 
rocks  of  Meillerie. 

178 


Rousseau  in  England  in  the  19th  Century 

Unfortunately,  the  name  of  this  critic  is  un- 
known . 

But  the  charm  was  not  to  be  broken  without  a  violent 
effort  being  made  to  restore  to  Rousseau  his  earlier 
supremacy.  It  came  from  the  group  of  brilliant  Radical 
writers,  who  had  not  accepted  the  Toryism  of  the  ruling 
classes,  to  whom  the  discredited  principles  of  the  Revolu- 
tion were  more  dear  than  they  had  ever  been,  and  who 
pinned  their  attractive  and  enthusiastic  aesthetic  reforms 
to  the  voluptuous  ecstasy  of  the  Nouvelle  Heloise  and  the 
chimerical  sentiment  of  Emile.  Already,  in  The  Round 
Table  (1814),  Hazlitt  had  recommended  the  Confessions 
as  the  "most  valuable  "  of  all  Rousseau's  writings;  he  was 
presently  in  his  Liber  /hnoris  (1823)  to  produce  the  work 
which  of  all  important  books  of  the  English  nineteenth 
century  was  to  reproduce  most  closely  the  manner  of  the 
Genevese  master.  Two  years  later,  having  made  a  very 
careful  examination  of  the  works,  Hazlitt  published  his 
essay  On  the  Character  of  Rousseau,  which  was  not  sur- 
passed, or  approached,  as  a  study  of  the  great  writer  until 
the  appearance  of  Lord  Morley's  monograph,  nearly  sixty 
years  afterwards. 

Hazlitt  exposes  the  baneful  effect  of  Burke's  attacks, 
while  acknowledging  that  from  his  own,  the  Tory  point 
of  view,  Burke  was  justified  in  taking  the  line  that  he  did. 
It  is  perfectly  true  that  "the  genius  of  Rousseau  levelled 
the  towers  of  the  Bastille  with  the  dust,"  but  Hazlitt,  an 
intellectual  revolutionary,  exults  in  the  admission.  Hazlitt 
allows,  nevertheless  that  the  exaggerated  hopes  founded 
upon  such  books  as  the  Contrat  Social  have  been  followed 
by  inevitable  disappointment.  It  was,  however,  not  the 
fault  of  Rousseau,  but  of  his  sanguine  and  absurd 
disciples,  that  Europe,  or  particularly  England,  has  "lost 
confidence  in  social  man."  Ecstatic  admirers  of  his  in- 
spired visions  had  expected  the  advent  of  Rousseau  to 
bring  in  a  millennium,  and  in  the  disappointment  founded 
on  the  excesses  of  the  French  Revolution  they  had  turned, 
with  ingratitude,  upon  the  pure  and  Utopian  dreamer  who 

179 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

had  drawn  things  as  they  should  be,  not  as  it  was  humanly 
possible  that  they  ever  could  be.  The  writings  of 
Rousseau,  he  declares,  are  looked  up  to  with  admiration 
by  friends  and  foes  alike  as  possessing  "the  true  revolu- 
tionary leaven,"  but  it  needs  political  foresight  and  a  rare 
capacity  of  imagination  to  perceive  that  this  operates, 
through  temporary  upheaval  and  distraction,  to  produce  an 
ultimate  harmony  and  a  beneficent  beauty.  In  the  course 
of  his  writings,  Hazlitt  frequently  quotes  Rousseau,  and 
always  with  admiration.  He  is  the  most  illuminating 
and  the  most  thoughtful  of  all  his  early  English 
critics. 

In  the  summer  of  1816  the  two  young  poets  of  the  day 
who  displayed  the  most  extraordinary  genius  in  England, 
or  perhaps  in  Europe,  made  acquaintance  with  one  another 
for  the  first  time,  and  instantly  determined  to  travel 
together.  They  met  in  Switzerland,  intoxicated  with  the 
unfamiliar  beauty  around  them,  and  Byron  took  the  Villa 
Diodati,  close  to  Geneva,  where  he  and  Shelley  steeped 
themselves  in  the  Nouvelle  Helo'ise  under  the  shadow  of 
Mont  Blanc.  In  June  they  started  together  round  the  lake 
on  a  journey,  which  turned  into  a  pilgrimage.  In  Shelley's 
Letters  may  be  read  the  enthusiastic  account  of  the  poets' 
visit  to  Meillerie.  Shelley  refrained  from  gathering  acacia 
and  roses  from  Gibbon's  garden  at  Lausanne,  "fearing  to 
outrage  the  greater  and  more  sacred  name  of  Rousseau,  the 
contemplation  of  whose  imperishable  creations  had  left  no 
vacancy  in  his  heart  for  mortal  things."  As  they 
sauntered  along  the  shores  of  the  enchanted  Leman,  the 
friends  "read  Julie  all  day."  They  lived,  with  the 
characters  of  the  great  romance,  in  an  endless  melan- 
choly transport.  Byron's  enthusiasm  took  the  form 
of  the  famous  stanzas  in  "Childe  Harold  III," 
beginning  : 

Here   the   self-torturingf   sophist,    wild   Rousseau. 

It  is  a  remarkable  instance  of  the  complete  decline  of 
the  prestige  of  Rousseau  in  England  that  Byron's  editor 

i8o 


Rousseau  in  England  in  the  19th  Century 

of  1899  is  astonished  that  Byron  and  Shelley  "should  not 
only  worship  at  the  shrine  of  Rousseau,  but  take  delight 
in  reverently  tracing  the  footstepsi  of  St.  Preux  and  Julie." 
He  is  so  completely  disconcerted  that  he  can  only  exclaim, 
"But  to  each  age  its  own  humour!  "  The  age  of  1899 
was  certainly  not  in  the  humour  for  Rousseau,  but  it  was 
almost  to  go  beyond  the  boundaries  of  reason  to  de- 
nounce, as  this  editor  did,  in  the  face  of  Byron's  raptures, 
"the  unspeakable  philanderings"  of  Rousseau.  Such 
was  not  the  p>oet's  judgment  when,  in  a  trance  of  pleasure, 
he  visited  all  the  scenes  of  the  Nouvelle  Helo'ise.  To 
Byron  the  long-drawn  loves  of  St.  Preux  and  of  Julie 
seemed  "most  passionate,  yet  not  impure,"  and  he 
vivaciously  proclaimed  their  creator  as  the  one  prophet 
of  Ideal  Beauty.  The  five  or  six  stanzas  mentioned  above 
are  so  well-known  as  to  be  positively  hackneyed.  We  no 
longer  set  on  them  any  very  high  poetical  value ;  we  see 
that  none  of  them  are  good  as  verses,  and  that  some  of 
them  are  bad.  But  the  whole  passage  retains  its  full  in- 
terest for  us.  It  is  a  perfectly  logical  statement  of  the 
author's  unbounded  admiration  for  Rousseau,  and  in  par- 
ticular for  the  "burning  page,  distempered  though  it 
seems,"  upon  which  are  celebrated  the  devouring  loves  of 
Julie  and  St.  Preux. 

Further  on,  in  the  same  poem,  Byron  rose  to  far  purer 
heights  of  style.  The  invocation  to  Clarens,  in  the  texture 
of  which  the  result  of  his  recent  intercourse  with  Shelley 
may  be  plainly  perceived,  is  probably  the  most  impassioned 
tribute  ever  paid  by  one  great  writer  to  the  literature  of 
another. 

All  things  are  here  of  him  ;  from  the  black  pines, 
Which  are  his  shade  on  high,  and  the  loud  roar 

Of  torrents,  where  he  listeneth,   to  the  vines 

Which  slope  his  green  path  downward  to  the  shore, 
Where  the  bow'd  waters  meet  him,  and  adore, 

Kissing  his  feet  with  murmurs,  and  the  wood, 
The  covert  of  old  trees,  with  trunks  all  hoar, 

But  light  leaves,  young  as  joy,  stands  where  it  stood, 

Offering  to  him,  and  his,  a  populous  solitude. 
M  181 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

A  populous  solitude  of  bees  and  birds, 

And  fairy-form'd  and  many-colour'd  thing^s, 

Who  worship  him  with  thoughts  more  sweet  than  words, 
And  innocently  open  their  glad  wings, 
P'earlcss  and  full  of  life. 

This  was  a  challenge,  addressed  by  the  most  powerful 
poet  of  the  day,  and  couched  in  idolatrous  language,  which 
it  was  not  possible  that  those  in  England  who  were  opposed 
to  the  influence  of  Rousseau  could  fail  to  take  up.  Nor 
did  Byron  pause  here.  Writing  from  Diodati,  July,  1816, 
his  famous  Sonnet  to  Lake  Leman,  Rousseau's  was  the 
first  illustrious  name  he  mentioned  in  the  brief  roll  of 
"Heirs  of  Immortality."  Enthusiasm  for  the  Nouvelle 
HeUnse  led  directly  to  the  composition  of  The  Prisoner 
of  Chillon.  Byron  discussed  and  repudiated,  with 
Stendhal  in  18 17,  his  mother's  old  dream  that  he  closely 
resembled  Rousseau.  All  that  prevented  his  embracing 
this  notion,  and  insisting  on  being  considered  an  avatar  of 
the  philosopher,  was  his  perception  of  something  turbid 
in  the  character  of  Rousseau,  hostile  to  the  fiery  ideal  of 
1816.  The  English  poet  preferred  to  be  thought  to  re- 
semble "an  alabaster  vase  lighted  up  within."  But  all  his 
life  the  memory  of  Jean  Jacques  continued  to  haunt  him  ; 
he  recollected  the  rans  des  vaches  when  he  was  writing 
The  Two  Foscari  (182 1)  and  la  pervenche  in  the  fourteenth 
canto  of  Don  Juan  (December,  1823).  When  Byron  died 
at  Missolonghi  the  latest  and  the  most  passionate  of 
Rousseau's  English  admirers  passed  away  with  him. 

The  rapture  of  the  sentimental  poets  was  not  allowed 
to  pass  unrebuffed.  In  October,  1816,  no  less  an  authority 
on  romance,  no  less  sane  and  typical,  and  yet  moderate 
and  sound  exponent  of  English  feeling  than  Sir  Walter 
Scott  took  up  his  parable  against  the  sentimentality 
of  the  disciples  of  Rousseau.  In  reviewing  "Childe 
Harold  III  "  in  the  Quarterly,  Walter  Scott  takes  Byron 
severely  to  task  for  his  exaggerated  praise  of  Rousseau. 
He  says  of  himself  that  he  is  "almost  ashamed  to  avow 
the  truth — he  had  never  been  able  to  feel  the  interest  or 

182 


Rousseau  in  England  in  the  19th  Century 

discover  the  merit  of  the  Nouvelle  Helo'ise.  .  .  .  The 
dulness  of  the  story  is  the  last  apology  for  its  exquisite 
immorality."  It  is  impossible  to  overestimate  the  im- 
portance of  this  utterance  of  Walter  Scott,  who  was  at 
that  very  moment  bringing  forth  the  amazing  series  of 
his  own  novels,  which  were  to  destroy  the  taste  of  his 
countrymen  for  all  such  works  of  the  imagination  as 
Rousseau  had  produced.  Scott  is  no  less  condemnatory 
of  the  political  influence  of  the  philosopher.  Deeply 
blaming  the  French  Revolution,  he  styles  Rousseau  "a 
primary  apostle"  of  it.  "On  the  silliness  of  Rousseau," 
on  the  subject  of  political  equality,  "it  is  at  this  time  of 
day,  thank  God !  useless  to  expatiate."  This  was  a 
counter-blast,  indeed,  to  the  melodious  trumpetings  of 
Byron  and  Shelley. 

To  a  reputation  already  much  reduced,  the  publication, 
in  1818,  of  the  Memoires  et  Conversations  of  Madame 
d'Epinay  was  a  serious  blow\  These  were  very  much 
discussed  in  England,  and  Jeffrey  called  the  special  atten- 
tion of  his  readers  to  the  lady's  revelations  of  Rousseau's 
"eccentricity,  insanity,  and  vice."  This  produced  a  pain- 
ful effect.  It  was  urged  by  English  critics  that  Jean 
Jacques,  who  had  been  held  up  as  a  portent  of  almost 
divine  moral  beauty,  seemed,  on  the  contrary,  to  have 
claimed,  "as  the  reward  of  genius  and  fine  writing,  an 
exemption  from  all  moral  duties."  Jeffrey  called  indignant 
attention  to  the  "most  rooted  and  disgusting  selfishness  " 
of  Rousseau,  and  quoted  with  approval  the  boutade  of 
Diderot,  "Get  homme  est  un  forcene."  The  publication 
of  Madame  de  Stael's  CEuvres  Inedites,  brought  out  by 
Madame  Necker  Saussure  in  1820,  further  lowered  the 
English  estimate  of  the  "selfish  and  ungrateful" 
Rousseau.  He  was  still  praised  for  his  "warmth  of 
im^agination,"  but  told  that  he  was  vastly  inferior  to 
Madame  de  Stael  in  style.  The  Edinburgh  Review  now 
proclaimed,  as  a  painful  discovery,  that  Rousseau's  affec- 
tion for  mankind  was  entirely  theoretical,  and  "had  no 
living  objects  in  this  world,"  and  blushed  at  the  "very 
scandalous   and    improper"   facts  about    his   private   life 

183 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

which  were  now  more  and  more  frequently  being 
revealed. 

The  publication  of  Simondi's  Voyage  en  Sui<ise  (1822), 
which  was  widely  read  in  lilngland,  continued  the  work  of 
denigration.  Simondi  spoke  with  contempt  and  even  with 
bitterness,  of  the  character  of  Rousseau.  His  English 
critics  pointed  out  that,  although  a  republican,  Simondi 
rose  above  political  prejudice.  He  called  the  Confessions 
the  most  admirable,  but  at  the  same  time  the  most  vile 
of  all  the  productions  of  genius.  Jeffrey,  once  again,  was 
eloquent  in  the  denunciation  of  Rousseau's  personal 
character,  which  there  seemed  to  be  no  one  left  in  England 
to  defend.  This  was  about  the  time  that  special  attention 
began  to  be  drawn  to  Rousseau's  exposure  of  his  natural 
children,  which  had  long  been  known,  but  which  now 
began  to  excite  English  disgust.  Moreover,  the  loose 
way  in  which  Rousseau  treated  fact  and  logic  irritated  the 
newer  school  of  English  and  Scotch  politicians  much  more 
than  it  had  their  predecessors,  and  the  invectives  of 
Burke  were  revivecf  and  confirmed.  There  were  still  some 
private,  though  few  public,  admirers  of  Rousseau  in 
England.  Carlyle  was  too  original  not  to  perceive  the 
value  of  the  Genevan  philosopher's  historical  attitude, 
and  not  to  feel  a  genuine  sympathy  for  his  character. 
But  we  find  him  quoting  (in  1823)  the  habits  of  "John 
James,"  as  he  chose  to  call  him,  not  adversely  but  a  little 
slightingly. 

Almost  the  latest  eulogist  of  Rousseau,  before  Morley, 
was  the  veteran  Republican  poet  Walter  Savage  Eandor, 
whose  admirable  Malesherbes  and  Rousseau  appeared, 
almost  unnoticed,  in  the  third  series  of  the  Imaginary 
Conversations  (1828).  This  interesting  composition  was 
certainly  not  written  when  Landor  reviewed  his  unpub- 
lished waitings  in  1824;  we  may  probably  date  it  1826. 
It  was  a  belated  expression  of  the  enthusiasm  of  a  pre- 
ceding generation,  in  full  sympathy  with  the  attitude  of 
Hazlitt  and  Byron.  It  attracted  no  attention,  for  England 
was  by  this  time  wholly  out  of  touch  with  the  old  prefer- 
ence of  the  impulse  of  the  individual  in  opposition  to  the 

184 


Rousseau  in  England  in  the  19th  Century 

needs  of  the  State.  There  was  in  England  a  growing 
cultivation  of  science,  and  by  its  side  a  growing  suspicion 
of  rhetoric,  and  both  of  these  discouraged  what  was  super- 
ficially lax  in  the  views  and  in  the  expression  of  Rousseau. 
The  Discourse  on  the  Origin  of  Inequality,  which  had 
delighted  an  earlier  generation  of  English  Liberals,  was 
now  re-examined,  and  was  rejected  with  impatience  as 
"dangerous  moonshine,"  supported  by  illogical  and  even 
ridiculous  arguments.  Moreover,  the  study  of  anthro- 
pology was  advancing  out  of  the  state  of  infancy,  and  was 
occupying  serious  minds  in  England,  who  were  ex- 
asperated by  Rousseau's  fantastic  theory  of  the  purity  of 
savage  society,  and  a  Golden  Age  of  primal  innocence. 
Moreover,  as  Morley  long  afterwards  pointed  out,  from 
about  the  year  1825,  there  was  a  rapid  increase  in  England 
of  the  superficial  cultivation  of  letters,  and  particularly 
of  scientific  investigation.  At  the  same  time,  'the  temper 
of  the  English  nation  repelled,  with  anger,  the  notion  that 
a  Swiss  philosopher,  of  discredited  personal  character, 
could  be  allowed  to  denounce  the  science  and  literature  of 
Europe. 

Thus  from  every  point  of  view,  the  hold  which 
Rousseau  had  held  on  English  admiration  was  giving 
way.  His  influence  v/as  like  a  snow  man  in  the  sun ;  it 
melted  and  dripped  from  every  limb,  from  all  parts  of  its 
structure.  But  probably  what  did  more  than  anything 
else  to  exclude  Rousseau  from  English  sympathy,  and  to 
drive  his  works  out  of  popular  attention,  was  the  sterner 
code  of  conduct  which  came  in,  as  a  reaction  to  the  swinish 
coarseness  of  the  late  Georgian  period.  We  must  pay 
some  brief  attention  to  a  moral  and  religious  phenomenon 
which  was  probably  more  than  any  other  fatal  to  the 
prestige  of  Rousseau. 

The  great  feature  of  the  new  Evangelical  movement  was 
an  insistence  on  points  of  conduct  which  had,  indeed, 
always  been  acknowledged  in  the  English  Church  as 
theoretically  important,  but  which  were  now  exalted  into 
a  lively  pre-eminence.  There  was  suddenly  seen,  through- 
out the  country,  a  marvellous  increase  in  religious  zeal,  in 

185 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

the  urging  of  penitence,  contrition  and  unworldliness  upon 
young  minds,  in  the  activity  which  made  practical  and 
operative  what  had  hitherto  been  largely  nominal. 
There  was  a  very  wide  awakening  of  the  sense  of  sin, 
and  a  quickening,  even  a  morbid  and  excessive  quicken- 
ing, of  the  Christian  instinct  to  put  off  "the  old  man, 
which  is  corrupt  according  to  the  deceitful  lusts,  and  to 
put  on  the  new  man,  which,  after  God,  is  created  in 
righteousness  and  true  holiness."  This  conviction  of  sin 
and  humble  acceptance  of  righteousness  was  to  be  accom- 
panied by  a  cultivation  of  all  the  contrite  and  retired  and 
decent  aptitudes  of  conduct,  so  that  not  only  should  no 
wrong  be  done  to  the  soul  of  others,  but  no  offence  given. 
These  were  the  objects  which  occupied  the  active  and  holy 
minds  of  the  early  Evangelists,  and  of  none  of  them  more 
practically,  in  relation  to  the  studies  and  the  reading  of 
the  young,  than  of  the  great  leader  of  the  movement, 
Charles  Simeon  (1756-1836). 

We  have  forgotten,  to  a  great  extent,  the  amazing 
influence  which  the  preaching  and  the  practice  of  these 
leading  Evangelicals  exercised  in  England  between  1820 
and  1840.  It  is  certain  that  the  young  scholars  of  Cam- 
bridge who  surrounded  Simeon  from  1810  onwards  were 
much  more  numerous  and  no  less  active  than  those  who 
surrounded  Newman  and  Pusey  at  Oxford  about  1835; 
while  in  each  case  the  disciples  trained  in  the  school  of 
enthusiasm  were  soon  dispersed,  to  spread  the  flame  of 
zeal  throughout  the  length  and  breadth  of  the  Three  King- 
doms. In  the  preface  of  his  famous  Helps  to  Composition, 
a  work  of  epoch-making  character,  Simeon  boldly  pro- 
posed three  tests  to  be  applied  to  any  species  of  literature. 
When  confronted  by  a  book,  the  reader  should  ask,  "  Does 
it  uniformly  tend  to  humble  the  Sinner,  to  exalt  the 
Saviour,  to  promote  holiness?"  A  work  that  lost  sight 
of  any  one  of  these  three  points  was  to  be  condemned 
without  mercy.  The  simplicity  and  freshness  of  the 
Evangelicals,  their  ridicule  of  what  was  called  "the  dignity 
of  the  pulpit,"  their  active,  breathless  zeal  in  urging  what 
they  thought  a  purer  faith  upon  all  classes  of  society,  gave 

1 86 


Rousseau  in  England  in  the   19th  Century 

them  a  remarkable  power  over  generous  and  juvenile 
natures.  They  were  wealthy,  they  were  powerful,  they 
stormed  the  high  places  of  society,  and  it  may  without 
exaggeration  be  said  that  for  the  time  being  they  changed 
the  whole  character  of  the  surface  of  English  social  life. 

The  work  of  the  Evangelicals,  in  emphasizing  the 
strong  reaction  against  the  coarseness  of  the  Georgian  era, 
has  been  greatly  forgotten  in  England,  and  on  the  Con- 
tinent has  never  been  in  the  least  understood.  It  is 
responsible,  to  deal  solely  with  what  interests  us  in  our 
present  inquiry,  for  the  prudery  and  "hypocrisy  "  of  which 
European  criticism  so  universally  accuses  our  Victorian 
literature  and  habits  of  thought.  It  is  perhaps  useless  to 
contend  against  a  charge  so  generally  brought  against 
English  ideas,  and  this  is  not  the  place  to  attempt  it.  But, 
so  far  as  Rousseau  is  concerned,  it  is  necessary  to  point 
out  that  to  a  generation  which  revolted  against  lascivious- 
ness  in  speech,  and  which  believed  that  an  indecent 
looseness  in  art  and  literature  was  a  sin  against  God, 
the  charm  of  the  Nouvelle  Helo'ise  and  of  the  Confessions 
could  not  be  apparent.  It  is  of  no  service  to  talk  about 
"hypocrisy";  English  readers  simply  disliked  books  of 
that  sort,  and  there  must  be  an  end  of  it. 

A  single  example  may  serve  to  show  how  rapid  the 
change  had  been.  Sir  James  Edward  Smith  (1759-1828) 
was  an  eminent  botanist,  who  travelled  widely  and  wrote 
many  letters.  In  1832  his  Memoirs  and  Correspondence 
were  published,  a  lively  work  which  was  much  read.  But 
Smith,  living  at  the  close  of  the  eighteenth  century,  had 
been  an  ardent  admirer  of  Rousseau,  and  this  appeared 
glaringly  in  his  letters.  Reviewers  in  1832  had  to  find 
excuses  for  his  "charitable  eye"  and  to  attribute  his 
partiality  to  Rousseau's  being  a  botanist.  There  was  quite 
a  flutter,  almost  a  scandal.  One  critic  plainly  said  that 
Sir  J.  E.  Smith's  "character  would  not  have  suffered  if  he 
had  made  some  abatement  from  his  extravagant  eulogy  " 
of  Rousseau.  The  Edinburgh  Review  was  very  severe, 
and  regretted  that  the  worthy  botanist  had  not  realized 
that  "religious  toleration  does  not  imply  the  toleration  of 

187 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

immorality,"  and  that  "licentiousness  of  speculation  is  as 
hostile  to  civil  liberty  as  licentiousness  of  conduct."  A 
critic  of  the  same  period  roundly  says  that  "the  vices  and 
opinions  of  Rousseau  are  of  so  malignant  an  aspect  that 
the  virtues  which  accompany  them  serve  only  to  render 
them  more  loathsome." 

Thus  Rousseau,  who  in  1800  was  regarded  in  England, 
even  by  his  enemies,  as  the  most  enchanting  of  writers, 
had  by  1835  sunken  to  be  regarded  as  despicable,  not  to  be 
quoted  by  decent  people,  not  to  be  read  even  in  secret.  He 
was  seldom  mentioned,  save  to  be  reviled.  The  career  of 
Rousseau  does  not  come  within  the  scope  of  Hallam  as  a 
critic,  yet  that  historian  was  unable,  in  the  second  volume 
of  his  Literature  of  Europe  (1838),  to  resist  a  sneer  at  the 
Contrat  Social,  while  he  describes  Rousseau's  arguments 
as  an  "insinuation  "  and  a  "calumny."  We  find  so  grave 
and  dignified  an  historian  as  Burton  using  his  Life  of 
Hume  (1846)  as  a  means  of  placing  Rousseau  in  the  most 
odious  light  possible,  and  without  a  word  of  sympathy. 
To  the  younger  Herman  Merivale,  in  1850,  the  influence  of 
Rousseau  seemed  "simply  mischievous,"  but  he  rejoiced  to 
think  that  his  fame  was  "a  by-gone  fashion."  Having,  in 
October,  1853,  been  led  to  express  an  ambiguous  comment 
on  the  Confessions,  Mrs.  Jameison,  then  the  leading 
English  art  critic,  hastened  to  excuse  herself  by  explaining 
that  "of  course,  we  speak  without  reference  to  the  im- 
morality which  deforms  that  work."  It  would  be  easy 
to  multiply  such  expressions,  but  difficult,  indeed,  in  the 
middle  of  the  century,  to  find  a  responsible  word  published 
by  an  English  writer  in  praise  of  Rousseau. 

After  this,  till  John  Morley's  monograph,  there  is  very 
little  to  be  recorded.  Rousseau  passed  out  of  sight  and  out 
of  mind,  and  was  known  only  to  those  few  who  went  to 
foreign  sources  of  inspiration  in  that  age  of  hard  British 
insularity.  But  we  have  lately  learned  that  there  were  two 
great  authors  who,  in  the  seclusion  of  their  own  libraries, 
were  now  subjecting  themselves  to  the  fascination  of  the 
Genevan.  On  February  9th,  1849,  George  Eliot  wrote 
thus  privately  to  a  friend  : 

188 


Rousseau  in  England  in  the  19th  Century 

It  would  signify  nothing  to  me  if  a  very  wise  person  were 
to  stun  me  with  proofs  that  Rousseau's  views  of  life,  religion, 
and  government  are  miserably  erroneous — that  he  was  guilty 
of  some  of  the  worst  bassesses  that  have  degraded  civilized 
man.  I  might  admit  all  this  :  and  it  would  not  be  the  less  true 
that  Rousseau's  genius  has  sent  that  electric  thrill  through 
my  intellectual  and  moral  frame  which  has  wakened  me  to  new 
perceptions.  .  .  .  The  rushing  mighty  wind  of  his  imagina- 
tion has  so  quickened  my  faculties  that  I  have  been  able  to 
shape  more  definitely  for  myself  ideas  which  had  previously 
dwelt  as  dim  Ahnungen  in  my  soul;  the  fire  of  his  genius  has 
so  fused  together  old  thoughts  and  prejudices,  that  I  have  been 
ready  to  make  new  combinations. 

Even  more  remarkable  is  the  evidence  which  Edward 
Cook,  in  his  Life  of  Ruskin{igi  i)  has  produced  with  regard 
to  the  attitude  of  that  illustrious  writer.  It  was  in  1849,  just 
when  George  Eliot  was  finding  her  spirit  quickened  by  the 
inspiration  of  Rousseau,  that  John  Ruskin,  at  the  age  of 
thirty,  made  a  pilgrimage  to  Les  Charmettes.  The  politi- 
cal revolt  which  coloured  all  his  later  years  was  now 
beginning  to  move  in  him,  and  for  the  first  time  he  felt 
affinities  existing  between  his  own  nature  and  that  of 
Rousseau.  This  consciousness  increased  upon  him.  In 
1862  he  wrote,  "I  know  of  no  man  whom  I  more  entirely 
resemble  than  Rousseau.  If  I  were  asked  whom  of  all  men 
of  any  name  in  past  time  I  thought  myself  to  be  grouped 
with,  I  should  answer  unhesitatingly — Rousseau.  I  judge 
by  the  Nouvelle  Heloise,  the  Confessions,  the  writings  of 
Politics  and  the  life  in  the  He  St.  Pierre."  In  1866  Ruskin 
added,  "The  intense  resemblance  between  me  and 
Rousseau  increases  upon  my  mind  more  and  more." 
Finally,  in  Preterita  (1886)  he  openly  acknowledged  his 
life-long  debt  to  Rousseau.  We  may  therefore  set  down 
the  impact  of  Rousseau  upon  Ruskin  as  marking  the  main 
influence  of  the  Genevese  writer's  genius  upon  English 
literature  in  the  nineteenth  century,  but  this  was  sympa- 
thetic, subterraneous,  and,  in  a  sense,  secret.  Without 
Rousseau,  indeed,  there  never  would  have  been  Ruskin, 
yet  we  are  only  now  beginning  to  recognize  the  fact. 

189 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

Of  the  overt  cult  of  Rousseau,  even  of  careful  and 
detailed  examination  of  his  works,  there  was  none  until 
Mr.  (now  Viscount)  Morley  published  his  brilliant  mono- 
graph in  1873.  This  famous  book,  so  remarkable  for  its 
gravity  and  justice,  its  tempered  enthusiasm,  its  absence 
of  prejudice,  the  harmony  and  illumination  of  its  parts,  is 
the  one  exception  to  the  public  neglect  of  Jean  Jacques  by 
nineteenth-century  Englishmen.  It  removed  the  reproach 
of  our  insular  ignorance;  it  rose  at  once  to  the  highest  level 
of  Continental  literature  on  the  subject.  The  monograph 
of  Morley  has  become  a  classic.  Incessantly  reprinted, 
it  has  remained  the  text-book  of  English  students  of 
Rousseau.  It  is  needless  in  this  place  to  draw  attention  to 
its  eminent  qualities,  or  to  the  fact  that  it  contained,  and 
continues  to  contain,  lacunar  which  the  eminent  writer  has 
not  attempted  to  fill  up  by  the  light  of  later  research.  In 
particular,  it  is  impossible  not  to  regret  that  Lord  Morley 
was  unacquainted  with  the  documents,  so  learnedly  edited 
and  lucidly  arranged  by  Mr.  L.  J.  Courtois,  on  the  events 
of  Rousseau's  sojourn  in  England.  But  Lord  Morley, 
immersed  in  the  duties  of  a  statesman,  seems  long  ago  to 
have  lost  all  interest  in  the  subject  which  he  illuminated  so 
brilliantly  nearly  fifty  years  ago. 

The  wide  publicity  given  to  Morley's  book  did  not, 
strangely  enough,  lead  to  any  great  revival  of  the  study  of 
Rousseau  in  Great  Britain.  English  readers  were  content 
to  accept  the  statements  and  the  views  of  Morley  without 
any  special  attempt  to  examine  or  continue  them.  There 
was  no  outburst  of  Rousseau  study  in  England  in  conse- 
quence of  the  volumes  of  1873.  English  translations  of 
his  works  continued  to  be  few  and  poor,  and  over  the 
Nouvelle  Heloise  and  the  Confessions  there  still  hung  a 
cloud  of  reproach.  They  were  held  to  be  immoral,  and 
dull  in  their  immorality.  During  the  last  decade  of  the 
century,  however,  a  certain  quickening  of  interest  began  to 
show  itself  in  a  variety  of  ways.  A  Rousseauiste,  who 
excelled  all  other  disciples  in  the  vehemence  of  her  admira- 
tion, was  revealed  in  1895  by  the  Studies  in  the  France  of 
Voltaire   and    Rousseau  of    Mrs.    Frederika    Macdonald. 

190 


Rousseau  in  England  in  the  19th  Century 

These,  however,  were  at  first  but  little  noticed,  and  the 
labours  of  this  lady,  culminating  in  her  violent  and 
excessive,  but  learned  and  original  New  Criticism  of 
J.  J.  Rousseau  (1906)  and  The  Humane  Philosophy  (1908) 
belong  to  the  twentieth  century.  It  is  to  be  hoped  that 
the  essays  of  Mrs.  Macdonald  may  stimulate  a  new  body 
of  workers  to  remove  the  stigma  which  has  lain  on  England 
for  a  hundred  years  of  being  dry  with  cynical  neglect  of 
Rousseau  while  all  the  rest  of  the  threshing-floor  of  Europe 
was  wet  with  the  dews  of  vivifying  criticism. 


191 


THE   CENTENARY  OF  LECONTE   DE  LISLE 

MANY  English  lovers  of  French  poetry  would  have 
been  sorry,  though  none  could  have  been  surprised, 
if  public  opinion  in  France  had  'been  too  much 
agitated  by  the  stupendous  events  of  the  War  to  spare  a 
thought  for  one  of  the  greatest  of  modern  poets  on  the 
occasion  of  his  hundredth  birthday.  But  it  was  not  so; 
on  the  eighteenth  of  October,  1918,  when  the  fighting  had 
approached  its  culminating  point,  and  when  all  the  for- 
tunes of  the  world  seemed  hanging  in  the  balance,  the 
serenity  of  French  criticism  found  room,  between  the 
bulletins  of  battle,  for  a  word  of  reminder  that  the  author 
of  Poetries  Antiques  and  Poemes  Barhares  was  born  a 
century  ibefore  in  the  tropic  island  of  La  Rc^union.  The 
recognition  was  not  very  copious,  nor  was  it  universally 
diffused,  but  in  no  circumstances  would  it  have  been 
either  the  one  or  the  other.  Leconte  de  Lisle  has  never 
been,  and  will  never  be,  a  "popular"  writer.  He  appeals 
to  a  select  group,  a  limited  circle,  which  neither  expands 
nor  contracts.  His  fame  has  never  been  excessive,  and  it 
will  never  disappear.  It  is  modest,  reserved,  and  durable. 
He  was  commonly  described  as  a  Creole.  His  father, 
an  army  surgeon — exiled  by  the  service  to  what  used  to  be 
called  the  lie  Bourbon — ^was  a  pure  Breton.  Charles 
Marie  Rene  Leconte  de  Lisle,  after  several  excursions  to 
India,  which  left  strong  traces  on  his  poetry,  arrived  still 
young  in  France,  and  ultimately  settled  in  Paris.  Thus 
he  lived  for  half  a  century,  in  great  simplicity  and  uni- 
formity, surrounded  by  adoring  friends,  but  little  known 
to  the  public.  In  middle  life  he  became  a  librarian  at  the 
Luxembourg;  as  old  age  was  approaching,  he  found 
himself  elected   to  succeed  Victor   Hugo  at  the   French 

193 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

Academy.  If  he  was  not  exactly  poor,  his  means  were 
strictly  moderate;  and  the  most  unpleasant  event  of  his 
wiiole  life  was  the  discovery,  at  the  fall  of  the  Empire, 
that,  although  his  opinions  were  republican,  he  had  been 
receiving  a  pension  from  the  government  of  Napoleon  III. 
Nothing  could  be  more  ridiculous  than  the  outcry  then 
raised  against  him;  for  he  was  a  poet  hidden  in  the  light 
of  thought,  and  no  politician.  It  was  an  honour  to  any 
government,  and  no  shame  to  the  austerest  poet,  that 
modest  public  help  should  enable  a  man  like  Leconte  de 
Lisle  to  exist  without  anxiety.  There  can  hardly  be  said 
to  have  been  any  other  event  in  this  dignified  and  blameless 
career. 

There  is  a  danger — but  there  is  also  a  fascination — in 
the  instinct  which  leads  us,  when  we  observe  literature 
broadly,  to  find  relations  or  parallelisms  between  inde- 
pendent and  diverse  personalities.  In  the  most  striking 
examples,  however,  where  there  has  been  no  actual  in- 
fluence at  work,  these  parallelisms  are  apt  to  be  very 
misleading.  Where  it  is  impossible  not  to  observe  ele- 
ments of  likeness,  as  between  Byron  and  Musset,  we  may 
take  them  to  be  actual,  and  no  matters  of  chance.  But 
the  similarity,  in  certain  aspects,  between  Alfred  de 
Vigny  and  Thomas  Hardy,  between  Andre  Chenier  and 
Keats,  between  Crabbe  and  Verhaeren,  must  be  accidental, 
and  is  founded  on  a  comparison  between  very  limited 
portions  of  the  work  of  each.  Nevertheless,  for  purposes 
of  illumination,  it  is  sometimes  useful — on  what  we  may 
call  the  Lamarckian  system — to  see  where  the  orbits  of 
certain  eminent  writers  of  distinctive  originalfty  approach 
nearest  to  one  another. 

It  is  admitted  that  Leconte  de  Lisle  is  pre-eminently 
gifted  among  the  poets  of  France  in  certain  clearly  defined 
directions.  His  poems,  which  are  marked  by  a  concinnity 
of  method  which  sometimes  degenerates  into  monotony, 
are  distinguished  above  all  others  by  their  haughty  con- 
centration of  effort,  by  their  purity  of  outline,  and  by  their 
extreme  precision  in  the  use  of  definite  imagery.  They 
aim,    with    unflinching    consistency,    at    a    realization    of 

194 


The  Centenary  of  Leconte  de  Lisle 

beauty  so  abstract  that  the  forms  by  which  it  is  interpreted 
to  the  imagination  are  almost  wholly  sculpturesque.  Is 
there  an  English  poet  of  whom,  at  his  best,  the  same 
language  might  be  used?  There  is  one,  and  only  one, 
and  that  is  Walter  Savage  Landor.  It  cannot  but  be 
stimulating  to  the  reader  to  put  side  by  side,  let  us  say, 
the  opening  lines  of  The  Hamadryad  and  of  Khiron,  or 
the  dialogue  of  Niobe  and  that  of  Thrasymedes  and  Euno'e, 
and  to  see  how  closely  related  is  the  manner  in  which  the 
English  and  the  French  poet  approach  their  themes.  The 
spirit  of  pagan  beauty  broods  over  Hypatie  et  Cyrille  as 
it  does  over  the  mingled  prose  and  verse  of  Pericles  and 
Aspasia,  and  with  the  same  religious  desiderium.  We 
shall  not  find  another  revelation  of  the  cupuscular 
magnificence  of  the  farthermost  antiquity  so  striking  as 
Landor's  Gebir,  unless  we  seek  it  in  the  Ka'in  of  Leconte 
de  Lisle. 

But  we  should  not  drive  this  parallel  too  far.  If  the 
breadth  and  majesty  of  vision  which  draw  these  two  poets 
together  are  notable,  not  less  so  are  their  divergencies. 
Landor,  who  so  often  appears  to  be  on  the  point  of  utter- 
ing something  magical  which  never  gets  past  his  lips, 
is  one  of  the  most  unequal  of  writers.  He  ascends  and 
descends,  with  disconcerting  abruptness,  from  an  ex- 
quisite inspiration  to  the  darkest  level  of  hardness. 
Leconte  de  Lisle,  on  the  other  hand,  is  the  victim  of  no 
vicissitudes  of  style  :  he  floats  in  the  empyrean,  borne  up 
apparently  without  an  effort  at  a  uniform  height,  like  his 
own  Condor  : 

II  dort  dans  I'air  glace,  les  ailes  toutes  grandes. 

Many  readers  —  particularly  those  on  whom  the 
romantic  heresy  has  laid  its  hands  with  the  greatest 
violence — resent  this  Olympian  imperturbability ;  and  the 
charge  has  been  frequently  brought,  and  is  still  occa- 
sionally repeated,  that  Leconte  de  Lisle  is  lacking  in 
sensibility,  that  he  dares  to  be  "impassible"  in  an  age 
when  every  heart  is  worn,  palpitating,  on  the  sleeve  of 

195 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

the  impulsive  lyrist.  He  was  accused,  as  the  idle  world 
always  loves  to  accuse  the  visionary,  of  isolating  himself 
from  his  kind  with  a  muttered  odi  profanum  vulgus  et 
arceo.  Such  an  opinion  is  founded  on  the  aspect  of  re- 
serve which  his  vast  legendary  pictures  suggest,  and  on 
the  impersonal  and  severely  objective  attitude  which  he 
adopts  with  regard  to  history  and  nature.  His  poems 
breathe  a  disdain  of  life  and  of  the  resilience  of  human 
appetite  (La  Mort  de  Valmiki),  a  love  of  solitude  (Le 
Desert),  a  determination  to  gaze  on  spectacles  of  horror 
without  betraying  nervous  emotion  (Le  Massacre  de 
Mona),  which  seem  superhuman  and  almost  inhuman. 
He  was  accused,  in  his  dramas — which  were  perhaps  the 
most  wilful,  the  least  spontaneous  part  of  his  work — of 
affecting  a  Greek  frightfulness  which  outran  the  early 
Greeks  themselves.  Francisque  Sarcey  said  that  Leconte 
de  Lisle,  in  his  tragedy  of  Les  Erinnyes,  scratched  the 
face  of  yEschylus,  as  though  he  did  not  find  it  bloody 
enough  already. 

The  subjects  which  Leconte  de  Lisle  prefers  are  never 
of  a  sort  to  promote  sentimentality  or  even  sensibility. 
He  writes  of  Druids  moaning  along  the  edge  of  hyper- 
borean cliflfs,  of  elephants  marching  in  set  column  across 
hot  brown  stretches  of  sand,  of  the  black  panther 
crouched  among  the  scarlet  cactus-blossoms,  of  the  polar 
bear  lamenting  among  the  rocks,  of  the  Syrian  sages 
whose  beards  drip  with  myrrh  as  they  sit  in  council  under 
the  fig-tree  of  Naboth.  He  writes  of  humming-birds  and 
of  tigers,  of  Malay  pirates  and  of  the  sapphire  cup  of 
Bhagavat,  of  immortal  Zeus  danced  round  by  the  young 
Oceanides,  and  of  Brahma  seeking  the  origin  of  things 
in  the  cascades  of  the  Sacred  River.  These  are  not  themes 
which  lend  themselves  to  personal  effusion,  or  on  which 
the  poet  can  be  expected  to  embroider  any  confessions  of 
his  egotism.  If  Leconte  de  Lisle  chooses  to  be  thus  remote 
from  common  human  interests — that  is  to  say,  from  the 
emotions  of  our  vulgar  life  to-day — ^his  is  the  responsi- 
bility, and  it  is  one  which  he  has  fully  recognized.  But 
that  his  genius  was  not  wholly  marmoreal,  nor  of  an  icy 

196 


The  Centenary  of  Leconte  de  Lisle 

impassibility,  the  careful  study  of  his  works  will  amply 
assure  us. 

It  is  strange  that  even  very  careful  critics  have  been 
led  to  overlook  the  personal  note  in  the  poems  of  Leconte 
de  Lisle  :  probably  because  the  wail  of  self-pity  is  so 
piercing  in  most  modern  verse  that  it  deadens  the  ear  to 
the  discreet  murmur  of  the  stoic  poet's  confession.  Hence 
even  Anatole  France  has  been  led  to  declare  that  the  author 
of  Poemes  Barhares  has  determined  to  be  as  obstinately 
absent  from  his  work  as  God  is  from  creation ;  and  that 
he  has  never  breathed  a  word  about  himself,  his  secret 
wishes,  or  his  personal  ideals.  But  what  is  such  a  passage 
as  the  following  if  not  a  revelation  of  the  soul  of  the  poet 
in  its  innermost  veracity? 

O  jeunesse  sacree,  irreparable  joie, 

Fdlicite  perdue,  oil  I'dme  en  pleurs  se  noic ! 

O  lumiere,  6  fraicheiir  des  monts  cahnes  et  bleus, 

Des  coteaux  et  des  bois  feuillages  onduleux, 

Aubes  d'un  jour  divin,  chants  des  mers  fortunees, 

Florissante  vigueur  de  tnes  belles  anuses  .   .   . 

Vous  vivez,  vous  chantez,  vous  palpitez  encor, 

Saintes  rialitis,  dans  vos  horizons  d'orl 

Mais,   6  nature,   6  del,  flots  sacris,  monts  sublimes, 

Bois  dont  les  vents  amis  font  murmurer  les  cimes. 

Formes  de  I'idial,  magnifiques  aux  yeux, 

Vous  avez  disparu  de  WrOn  coeur  oublieux ! 

Et  void  que,  lassS  de  voluptes  amdres, 

Haletant  du  disir  de  mes  mille  chimdres. 

Hilars !  j'ai  desappris  les  hymnes  d' autrefois, 

Et  que  mes  dieux  trahis  n'entendent  plus  ma  voix. 

This  is  a  note  more  often  heard,  perhaps,  in  English 
than  in  French  poetry.  It  is  the  lament  of  Wordsworth 
for  the  "visionary  gleam"  that  has  fled,  for  "the  glory 
and  the  dream  "  that  fade  into  the  light  of  common  day. 

Leconte  de  Lisle  is  unsparing  with  the  results  of  his 

erudition,  and  this  probably  confirms  the  popular  notion  of 

his  remoteness.     Here,  however,  returning  for  a  moment 

to  Landor,   we  may  observe  that  he   is  never  so  close- 

N  197 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

packed  and  never  so  cryptic  as  the  aullior  of  Ckrysaor  and 
Gunlaug.  What  Leconte  de  Lisle  has  to  tell  us  about 
mysterious  Oriental  sages  and  mythical  Scandinavian 
heroes  may  be  unfamiliar  to  the  reader,  but  is  never 
rendered  obscure  by  his  mode  of  narration.  Nothing 
could  be  less  within  our  ordinary  range  of  experience 
than  the  adventure  of  Le  Barde  de  Temrah,  who  arrives 
at  dawn  from  a  palace  of  the  Finns,  in  a  chariot  drawn 
by  two  white  buffaloes;  but  Leconte  de  Lisle  recounts  it 
voluminously,  in  clear,  loud  language  which  leaves  no 
sense  of  doubt  on  the  listener's  mind  as  to  what  exactly 
happened. 

His  Indian  studies  became  less  precise  in  the  Poemes 
Barbares  than  they  had  been  in  the  early  Poemes 
Antiques ;  perhaps  under  the  stress  of  greater  knowledge. 
But  he  had  been  from  early  youth  personally  acquainted 
with  the  Indian  landscapes  which  he  describes.  With  the 
ancient  Sanscrit  literature,  I  suppose  he  had  mainly  an 
acquaintance  through  translations,  of  which  those  by 
Burnouf  may  have  inspired  him  most.  Whether,  if  he 
had  lived  to  read  Professor  Jacobi's  proof  that  Valmiki 
was  a  historical  character,  and  the  author  in  its  original 
form  of  the  earliest  and  greatest  epic  of  India,  the 
Ramayana,  Leconte  de  Lisle  would  have  been  annoyed  to 
remember  that  he  had  treated  Valmiki  as  a  mythical 
person,  symbolically  devoured  by  white  ants,  it  is  im- 
possible to  say.  Probably  not,  for  he  only  chose  these 
ancient  instances  to  illustrate  from  the  contemplative 
serenity  of  Brahmanism  his  own  calm  devotion  to  the 
eternal  principle  of  beauty. 

Bhagavat!  Bhagavat!  Essence  des  Essences, 
Source  de  la  beautd,  fleuve  des  Renaissances, 
LutnUre  qui  fait  vivre  et  mourir  ci  la  fois. 

Probably  no  other  European  poet  has  interpreted  with 
so  much  exactitude,  because  with  so  intense  a  sympathy, 
the  cosmogony  and  mythology  of  the  Puranas,  with  their 
mystic  genealogies  of  gods  and  kings. 

198 


The  Centenary  of  Leconte  de  Lisle 

The  harmony  and  sonorous  fullness  of  the  verse  of 
Leconte  de  Lisle  were  noted  from  the  first,  even  by  those 
who  had  least  sympathy  with  the  subjects  of  it.  He 
achieved  the  extreme — we  may  almost  say  the  excessive 
— purity  of  his  language  by  a  tireless  study  of  the  Greeks 
and  of  the  great  French  poets  of  the  seventeenth  century, 
with  whom  he  had  a  remarkable  sympathy  at  a  time  when 
they  were  generally  in  disfavour.  His  passion  for  the  art 
of  Racine  may  be  compared  with  the  close  attention  which 
Keats  gave  to  the  versification  of  Dryden.  He  greatly 
venerated  the  genius  of  Victor  Hugo,  who  was  perhaps 
the  only  contemporary  poet  of  France  who  exercised  any 
influence  over  the  style  of  Leconte  de  Lisle.  It  is  difficult 
to  define  in  what  that  influence  consisted ;  the  two  men  had 
essentially  as  little  resemblance  as  Reims  Cathedral  has 
to  the  Parthenon,  Victor  Hugo  being  as  extravagantly 
Gothic  as  Leconte  de  Lisle  was  Attic.  But  the  younger 
poet  was  undoubtedly  fascinated  by  the  tumultuous 
cadences  of  his  more  various,  and,  we  must  admit,  more 
prodigious  predecessor.  They  agreed,  moreover,  in  ap- 
pealing to  the  ear  rather  than  to  the  eye.  Verlaine  has 
described  Leconte  de  Lisle's  insistence  on  the  vocal  har- 
monies of  verse,  and  he  adds  :  "When  he  recited  his  own 
poems,  a  lofty  emotion  seemed  to  vibrate  through  his 
whole  noble  figure,  and  his  auditors  were  drawn  to  him 
by  an  irresistible  sympathy."  It  must  have  been  a  won- 
derful experience  to  hear  him,  for  instance,  chant  the  iron 
terse  rime  of  Le  Jugement  de  Konor,  or  the  voluptuous 
languor  of  Nourmahal. 

Much  has  been  said  about  the  sculpturesque  character 
of  Leconte  de  Lisle's  poems.  But  a  comparison  of  them 
to  friezes  of  figures  carved  out  of  white  marble  scarcely 
does  justice  to  their  colour,  though  it  may  indicate  the 
stability  of  their  form.  It  would  be  more  accurate  to 
compare  them  to  the  shapes  covered  with  thin  ivory  and 
ornamented  with  gold  and  jewels,  in  which  the  Greeks, 
and  even  Pheidias  himself,  delighted.  The  Poemes 
Antiques  are,  in  fact,  chryselephantine.  But  Leconte 
de  Lisle  was  a  painter  also,  and  perhaps  the  chief  difference 

199 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

to  be  observed  between  the  early  compositions  and  the 
Poemcs  Barbarcs  consists  in  the  pictorial  abundance  of 
the  latter.  His  descriptions  have  the  character  of  broadly- 
brushed  cartoons  of  scenes  which  are  usually  exotic,  as 
of  some  Puvis  de  Chavannes  who  had  made  a  leisurely 
voyage  in  Orient  seas.  Leconte  de  Lisle  floods  his  canvas 
with  light,  and  his  favourite  colours  are  white  and  golden 
yellow;  even  his  fiercest  tragedies  are  luminous.  India 
he  sees  not  as  prosaic  travellers  have  seen  it,  but  in  a 
blaze  of  dazzling  splendour  : 

Tes  fleuves  sont  pareils  aux  pythons  lumineux 

Qui  sur  les  palmiers  verts  enroulent  leurs  beaux  nceuds ; 

Us  glissent  au  dHour  de  tes  belles  collines 

En  guirlandes  d'argent,   d'azur,   de  perles  fines. 

It  is  natural  that  a  nature  so  eminently  in  harmony  with 
the  visual  world,  and  so  pagan  in  all  its  instincts,  should  be 
indifferent  or  even  hostile  to  Christianity.  His  stoic 
genius,  solidly  based  on  the  faiths  of  India  and  of  Hellas, 
finds  the  virtues  of  humility  and  of  tender  resignation 
contemptible.  In  the  very  remarkable  dialogue,  Hypatie 
et  Cyrille,  Leconte  de  Lisle  defines,  with  the  voice  of  the 
Neoplatonist,  his  own  conception  of  religious  truth.  It  is 
one  in  which  Le  vil  Galileen  has  neither  part  nor  lot.  We 
have  to  recognize  in  his  temper  a  complete  disdain  of  all 
the  consolations  of  the  Christian  faith,  or  rather  an 
inability  to  conceive  in  what  they  consist,  and  no 
phenomenon  in  literature  is  more  curious  than  that,  after  a 
single  generation,  French  poetry  should  have  returned  to 
the  aggressive  piety  which  strikes  an  English  reader  as  so 
incomprehensible  in  M.  Francis  Jammes  and  in  M.  Paul 
Claudel.     But  poetry  has  many  mansions. 

The  person  of  Leconte  de  Lisle  is  described  to  us  as 
characteristic  of  his  work.  He  was  very  handsome,  with 
a  haughty  carriage  of  the  head  on  a  neck  "as  pure  and  as 
solid  as  a  column  of  marble."  A  monocle,  which  never 
left  his  right  eye,  gave  a  modern  touch  to  an  aspect  which 
might  else   have   been   too   rigorously   antique.     A  droll 

200 


The  Centenary  of  Leconte  de  Lisle 

little  pseudo-anecdote,  set  by  Theodore  de  Banville  in  his 
inimitable  amalgam  of  wit  and  fancy,  illuminates  the  effect 
which  Leconte  de  Lisle  produced  upon  his  contemporaries. 
I  take  it  from  that  delicious  volume,  too  little  remembered 
to-day,  the  Camees  Parisiens,  of  1873  : 

Leconte  de  Lisle  was  walking-  with  ^schylus  one  day,  in 
the  ideal  fatherland  of  tragedy,  when,  while  he  was  conversing 
with  the  old  hero  of  Salamis  and  of  Platea,  he  suddenly 
observed  that  his  companion  was  so  bald  that  a  tortoise  might 
easily  mistake  his  skull  for  a  polished  rock.  Not  wishing, 
therefore,  to  humiliate  the  titanic  genius,  and  yet  not  able 
without  regret  to  give  up  an  ornament  the  indispensable 
beauty  of  which  was  obvious,  he  made  up  his  mind  to  be 
totally  bald  in  front,  while  retaining  on  the  back  of  his  head 
the  silken  and  curly  wealth  of  an  Apollonian  chevelure. 

It  was  perhaps  in  the.  course  of  these  walks  with 
^schylus  that  Leconte  de  Lisle  formed  the  habit  of  spell- 
ing Clytemnestre  "Klytaimnestra."  The  austerities  of  his 
orthography  attracted  a  great  deal  of  attention,  and 
cannot  be  said  to  have  succeeded  in  remoulding  French 
or  spelling.  People  continue  to  write  "Cain,"  although 
the  poet  insisted  on  "Kain,"  and  even,  in  his  sternest 
moments,  on  "Qain."  He  believed  that  his  text  gained 
picturesqueness,  and  even  exactitude  of  impression,  by 
those  curious  archaisms.  They  are,  at  least,  characteristic 
of  the  movement  of  his  mind,  and  the  reader  who  is 
offended  by  them  must  have  come  to  the  reading  with  a 
determination  to  be  displeased.  His  vocabulary  is  more 
difficult ;  and  sometimes,  it  must  be  confessed,  more  ques- 
tionable. He  uses,  without  explanation  or  introduction, 
the  most  extraordinary  terms.  Ancient  Roman  emperors 
are  said  to  have  shown  their  largess  by  putting  real  pearls 
into  the  dishes  which  they  set  before  their  guests.  This 
was  generous;  but  the  guest  who  broke  his  tooth  upon  a 
gift  must  have  wished  that  the  pearl  had  been  more  con- 
ventionally bestowed  upon  him.  So  the  reader  of  Leconte 
de  Lisle  may  be  excused  if  he  resents  the  sudden  appari- 

201 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

tion  of  such  strange  words  as  "bobres,"  "bigaylles,"  and 
"pennbaz  "  in  the  text  of  this  charming  poet. 

In  spite  of  tliese  eccentricities,  which  are  in  fact  quite 
superficial,  and  in  spite  of  a  suspicion  of  pedantry  which 
occasionally  holds  the  reader's  attention  at  arm's  length, 
there  is  no  French  poet  of  our  day  more  worthy  of  the 
attention  of  a  serious  English  student.  Leconte  de  Lisle 
cultivated  the  art  of  poetry  with  the  most  strenuous 
dignity  and  impersonality.  He  had  a  great  reverence  for 
the  French  language,  and  not  a  little  of  the  zeal  of  the 
classic  writers  of  the  seventeenth  century  who  aimed  at 
the  technical  perfection  of  literature.  He  is  lucid  and 
direct  almost  beyond  parallel.  In  England,  among  those 
who  approach  French  literature  with  more  enthusiasm 
than  judgment,  there  is  a  tendency  to  plunge  at  once  into 
what  is  fashionable  for  the  moment  on  the  Boulevard  Saint 
Michel.  We  have  seen  British  girls  and  boys  affecting  to 
appreciate  Verlaine,  and  even  Mallarm^,  without  having 
the  smallest  acquaintance  with  Racine  or  Alfred  de  Vigny. 
It  is  pure  snobisme  to  pretend  to  admire  Prose  pour  Des 
Esseintes  when  you  are  unable  to  construe  Montaigne.  For 
all  such  foreign  folly,  the  rigorous  versification,  the  pure 
and  lucid  language,  and  the  luminous  fancy  of  Leconte  de 
Lisle  may  be  recommended  as  a  medicine. 


202 


TWO    FRENCH    CRITICS 

EMILE    FAGUET— REMY    DE    GOURMONT 

THE  importance  of  literary  criticism  in  the  higher 
education  of  a  race  has  been  recognized  in  no 
country  in  the  world  except  France.  Elsewhere 
there  have  arisen  critics  of  less,  or  more,  or  even  of 
extreme  merit,  but  nowhere  else  has  there  been  a  systematic 
training  in  literature  which  has  embraced  a  whole  genera- 
tion, and  has  been  intimately  combined  with  ethics.  The 
line  of  action  which  Matthew  Arnold  vainly  and 
pathetically  urged  on  the  Anglo-Saxon  world  has  been 
unobtrusively  but  most  effectively  taken  by  France  for 
now  more  than  half  a  century.  When  the  acrid  and 
ridiculous  controversy  between  the  Classical  and  the 
Romantic  schools  died  down,  criticism  in  France  became 
at  once  more  reasonable  and  more  exact.  The  fatuous 
formula  which  has  infected  all  races,  and  is  not  yet 
extirpated  in  this  country — the  "I  do  not  like  you, 
Dr.  Fell,  the  reason  why  I  cannot  tell  " — passed  into 
desuetude.  It  was  implicitly  recognized  that  it  is  your 
duty,  if  you  express  a  view,  to  be  able  to  "tell  "  on  what 
principles  it  is  founded.  In  fact,  if  we  concentrate  our 
attention  on  the  progress  of  French  professional  criticism, 
we  see  it  becoming  steadily  more  philosophical  and  less 
empirical. 

But  about  1875,  after  the  period  of  Taine  and  Renan, 
and,  in  a  quite  other  field,  after  that  of  Gautier  and  Paul 
de  Saint  Victor,  we  find  criticism  in  Paris  rapidly  tending 
in  two  important  directions,  becoming  on  the  one  hand 
more  and  more  exacf,  almost  scientific,  on  the  other 
daringly  personal  and  impressionist.  Ferdinand  Brune- 
ti^re,  who  was  a  man  of  extraordinary  force  of  character, 

203 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

gave  a  colour  to  the  whole  scheme  of  literary  instruction 
throughout  France.  He  resisted  the  idea  that  literature 
was  merely  an  entertainment  or  a  pastime.  He  asserted 
that  it  was  the  crown  and  apex  of  a  virile  education,  and  he 
declared  its  aim  to  be  the  maintenance  and  progress  of 
morality.  With  Bruneti^re  everything  was  a  question  of 
morals.  He  was  a  strong  man,  and  a  fighting  man ;  he 
enjoyed  disputation  and  snuffed  the  breath  of  battle. 
He  advanced  the  impersonality  of  literature  and  stamped 
on  the  pride  of  authors.  In  the  year  1900,  an  observer 
glancing  round  professorial  circles  had  to  admit  that  the 
influence  of  Bruneti^re  had  become  paramount.  His 
arbitrary  theory  of  the  Evolution  des  genres,  founded  on 
Herbert  Spencer  and  Darwin,  and  applied  to  the  study 
of  literature,  pervaded  the  schools. 

But  the  vehement  tradition  of  Bruneti^re  was  under- 
mined from  the  first  by  his  two  greatest  rivals,  Anatole 
France  and  Jules  Lemaitre,  whose  character  was  the  exact 
opposite  of  his.  They  were  "impressionist"  critics, 
occupied  with  their  own  personal  adventures  among  books, 
and  not  actively  concerned  with  ethics.  Their  influence, 
especially  that  of  Lemaitre,  since  Anatole  France  retired 
from  criticism  before  the  close  of  the  century,  tempered 
what  was  rigid  and  insensitive  in  the  too-vehement 
dogmatism  of  Bruneti^re,  but  they  did  not  form  a  camp 
distinct  from  his.  The  sodality  of  the  French  Academy 
kept  them  together  in  a  certain  happy  harmony,  in  spite 
of  their  contrast  of  character.  Brunetl^re  died  in  1906, 
Lemaitre  in  1914;  the  effect  of  the  one  upon  education,  of 
the  other  upon  social  culture,  had  been  immense,  but  it 
had  not  advanced  since  1900.  With  the  new  century, 
new  forces  had  come  into  prominence,  and  of  the  two  most 
important  of  these  we  speak  to-day. 

It  was  the  fate  of  France  to  lose,  within  a  few 
months,  the  two  most  prominent  critics  of  the  period 
succeeding  that  of  which  I  have  just  spoken.  The  death 
of  Emile  Faguet  and  of  Remy  de  Gourmont  marks  another 
stage  in  the  progress  of  criticism,  and  closes  another 
chapter  in  its  history.     That  their  methods  and  modes  of 

204 


Two  French  Critics 

life  were  excessively  different;  that  their  efforts,  if  not 
hostile,  were  persistently  opposed;  that  one  was  the  most 
professorial  of  professors,  the  other  the  freest  of  free 
lances;  that  each,  in  a  word,  desired  to  be  what  the  other 
was  not;  adds  a  piquancy  to  the  task  of  considering  them 
side  by  side.  The  first  thing  we  perceive,  in  such  a 
parallel,  is  the  superficial  contrast;  the  second  is  the  innate 
similitude,  so  developed  that  these  spirits  in  opposition 
are  found  in  reality  to  represent,  in  a  sort  of  inimical 
unison,  the  whole  attitude  towards  literature  of  the  genera- 
tion in  which  they  flourished.  Their  almost  simultaneous 
disappearance  leaves  the  field  clear  for  other  procedures 
under  their  guidance.  In  the  extremely  copious  published 
writings  of  these  two  eminent  men  the  name  of  each  of 
them  will  scarcely  be  found.  They  worked,  in  their 
intense  and  fervid  spheres,  out  of  sight  of  one  another. 
But,  now  both  are  dead,  it  is  interesting  to  see  how  close 
to  each  other  they  were  in  their  essential  attitude,  and  how 
typical  their  activity  is  of  the  period  between   1895  and 

1915- 

If  anyone  should  rashly  engage  to  write  the  life  of 
Emile  Faguet,  he  would  find  himself  limited  to  the  task 
of  compvosing  what  the  critic  himself,  in  speaking  of 
Montaigne,  calls  "the  memoirs  of  a  man  who  never  had 
any  occupation  but  thinking."  Through  the  whole  of  a 
life  which  approached  the  term  of  threescore  years  and 
ten,  Faguet  was  absorbed,  more  perhaps  than  any  other 
man  of  his  time,  in  the  contemplation  of  the  printed  page. 
He  said  of  himself,  "I  have  never  stopped  reading,  except 
to  write,  nor  writing,  except  to  read."  In  any  other 
country  but  France,  this  preoccupation  would  have  led 
to  dreariness  and  pedantry,  if  not  to  a  permanent  and 
sterile  isolation.  But  in  France  purely  literary  criticism, 
the  examination  and  constant  re-examination  of  the  classics 
of  the  nation,  takes  an  honoured  and  a  vivid  place  in  the 
education  of  the  young.  The  literary  teaching  of  the 
schools  is  one  of  the  moral  and  intellectual  forces  of  the 
France  of  to-day,  and  Faguet,  who  was  the  very  type,  and 
almost  the   exaggeration,   of   that   tendency   in   teaching, 

205 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

was  preserved  from  pedantry  by  the  immense  sympathy 
which  surrounded  him.     His  capacity  for  comprehending 
books,  and  for  making  others  comprehend  them,   found 
response  from  a  grateful  and  thirsty  multitude  of  students. 
Emile  Faguet  was  born,  on  the  17th  of  December,  1847, 
at  La  Roche-sur-Yon,   in  Vendue,   where  his  father  was 
professor  at  the  local  lyc6e.     M.  Victor  Faguet,  who  had 
received  a  prize  for  a  translation  of  Sophocles  into  verse, 
nourished  high  academic  ambitions  for  his  son.     From 
the    noiseless  annals  of   the   future   critic's  childhood  a 
single  anecdote  has  been  preserved,  namely  that,  when  he 
was  a  schoolboy,  he  solemnly  promised  his  father  that  he 
would  become  a  member  of  the  French  Academy.     All 
his  energy   was   centred   towards  that   aim.     He    passed 
through  the  regular  course  which  attends  young  men  who 
study  for  the  professoriate  in  France,  and  at  last  he  be- 
came a  professor  himself  at  Bordeaux,  and  then  in  Paris. 
But  in  that  career,  as  Dr.  Johnson  sententiously  observed, 
"Unnumber'd  suppliants  croud  Preferment's  Gate,"  and 
at  thirty-five  Emile  Faguet  was  still  quite  undistinguished. 
He    saw    his    juniors,    and    in    particular    Lemaitre    and 
Bruneti^re,    speed   far   in   front  of   him,    but   he   showed 
neither  impatience  nor  ill-temper.    Gradually  he  became  a 
writer,  but  it  was  not  until  1885  that  his  Les  Grands  Mattres 
du  XVI'  Siecle  attracted  the  attention  of  the  public.     He 
began  to  be  famous  at  the  age  of  forty,  when  his  Etudes 
Litteraires  sur  le  XIX'  Siecle,  clear,  well  arranged,  amus- 
ing and  informing,  proved  to  French  readers  that  here  was 
a    provider   of   substantial    literature,    always    intelligent, 
never  tiresome,  who  was  exactly  to  their  taste.     From  that 
time   forth    the   remaining   thirty   years  of   Faguet's   life 
extended  themselves  in   a  ceaseless  cheerful   industry  of 
lecturing,  writing,  and  interpreting,   which  bore  fruit  in 
a  whole  library  of  published  books,   perhaps  surpassing 
in  bulk  what  is  known  as  the  "output  "  of  any  other  mortal 
man . 

Though  ever  more  concerned  with  ideas  than  with  per- 
sons, Faguet  did  not  disdain,  in  happy,  brief,  and  salient 
lines,  to  sketch  the  authors  who  had  written  the  books  he 

206 


Two  French  Critics 

analysed.  Let  us  attempt  a  portrait  of  himself  as  he 
appeared  in  the  later  years  of  his  life.  No  one  ever  less 
achieved  the  conventional  type  of  academician.  His  per- 
son was  little  known  in  society,  for  he  scarcely  ever  dined 
out.  He  had  so  long  been  a  provincial  professor  that  he 
never  threw  off  a  country  look.  In  sober  fact,  Emile 
Faguet,  with  his  brusque,  stiff  movements,  his  rough 
brush  of  a  black  moustache,  and  his  conscientious  walk, 
looked  more  like  a  non-commissioned  officer  in  mufti  than 
an  ornament  of  the  Institut.  He  was  active  in  the  streets, 
stumping  along  with  an  umbrella  always  pressed  under 
his  arm ;  on  his  round  head  there  posed  for  ever  a  kind  of 
ancient  billycock  hat.  He  had  a  supreme  disdain  for 
dress,  and  for  the  newspapers  which  made  jokes  about  his 
clothing.  He  lived  in  a  little  stuffy  apartment  in  the  Rue 
Monge — on  the  fifth  storey,  if  I  remember  right.  He  was 
an  old  bachelor,  and  the  visitor,  cordially  welcomed  to 
his  rooms,  was  struck  by  the  chaos  of  books — chairs, 
tables,  the  floor  itself  being  covered  with  volumes,  drowned 
in  printed  matter.  Just  space  enough  swept  out  to  hold 
the  author's  paper  and  ink  was  the  only  oasis  in  the  desert 
of  books.  I  remember  that,  at  the  height  of  his  fame  and 
prosperity,  there  was  no  artificial  light  in  his  rooms.  That 
army  of  his  publications  was  marshalled  by  the  sole  aid 
of  a  couple  of  candles.  Everything  about  him,  but 
especially  the  frank  dark  eyes  lifted  in  his  ingenuous  face, 
breathed  an  air  of  unaffected  probity  and  simplicity,  and 
of  a  kind  of  softly  hurrying  sense  that  life  was  so  short, 
and  there  were  so  many  books  to  read  and  to  write,  that 
there  could  be  no  time  left  for  nonsense. 

His  image  will  long  recur  to  the  inner  vision  of  his 
friends,  as  he  went  marching  to  his  lecture  or  to  his  news- 
paper-office, nonchalant  and  easy,  with  his  hands  in  his 
pockets,  his  elbow  squeezing  that  enormous  umbrella  to 
his  side.  In  the  evening  he  would  go,  inelegantly  dressed, 
in  the  same  loosely  martial  way,  to  the  theatre,  for  which 
he  had  an  inordinate  affection.  He  was  not  a  "first- 
nighter,"  but  dropped  in  to  see  a  new  piece  whenever  he 
wanted  copy  for  his  feuillcton.     His  lectures,  it  is  reported, 

207 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

were  familiar  and  conversational,  with  frequent  repetition 
and  copious  quotation,  the  whole  poured  out  as  a  man 
tells  a  story  which  he  intimately  knows,  with  an  inex- 
haustible flow  of  thoughts  and  facts.  Sometimes  he  was 
so  vivacious  as  to  be  a  little  paradoxical,  and  led  a  laugh 
against  himself.  He  stood  before  his  students,  formidable 
only  in  his  erudition,  easy  of  approach,  austere  and  gay. 
His  congested  rooms  in  the  Rue  Monge  were  open  to  any 
young  inquirer,  but  it  was  observed  that  Faguet  never 
asked  what  the  name  of  his  visitor  was,  but  how  old  he 
was.  The  younger  the  student,  the  less  dogmatic  was  the 
professor,  but  the  more  familiar,  abundant,  sympathetic. 
It  was  noticeable  in  all  his  relations,  with  young  and  old 
alike,  that  Faguet's  one  aim  invariably  seemed  to  be 
honestly  to  make  his  Interlocutor  comprehend  the  matter  in 
hand. 

Some  recollections  of  the  outer  presence  of  Emile 
Faguet  should  not  be  without  value  to  us  in  fixing  the 
character  of  his  inner  life,  the  spirit  which  pervaded  his 
profuse  and  honest  labour.  No  one  in  the  history  of 
literature  has  been  more  distinguished  for  intellectual 
probity;  and  no  one  has  cared  less  for  appearances,  or  for 
the  glorification  of  his  own  character  and  cleverness.  His 
value  as  a  critic  consists  primarily  in  his  capacity  for 
thoroughly  understanding  what  each  author  under  con- 
sideration meant  by  this  or  that  expression  of  his  art. 
Faguet  does  not  allow  himself  to  be  stung  into  eloquence 
by  the  touch  of  a  master-mind,  as  Lemaitre  does,  nor  does 
he  fly  ofif  from  his  subject  on  the  wings  of  an  imperative 
suggestion,  like  Anatole  France,  but  he  sticks  close  to  the 
matter  in  hand,  so  close  that  he  reaches  comprehension 
by  becoming  absorbed  in  it.  There  is  no  writer  on  litera- 
ture who  has  ever  crept  so  completely  into  the  skin  of  each 
old  author  as  Faguet  has  done.  He  makes  the  dry  bones 
live;  he  resuscitates  the  dead,  and  revives  in  them  all  that 
was  essential  in  their  original  life,  all  that  was  really  vital 
in  them,  even  if  it  be  ultimately  to  condemn  the  taste  or 
the  tendency  exhibited.  The  first  object  with  him  is  to 
vivify;  to  analyse  and  dissect  come  next. 

208 


Two  French  Critics 

He  was  open  to  all  impressions,  and  he  was  par- 
ticularly admirable  in  his  periodical  surveys  of  the  four 
great  centuries  of  French  verse  and  prose,  because  of  his 
unflagging  open-mindedness.  He  saw  the  living  thread 
of  literary  history,  running,  a  pulsating  stream,  from 
Rabelais  to  Flaubert.  He  had  followed  it  so  often,  up 
and  down,  this  way  and  that,  that  no  curve  of  it,  no  back- 
water was  unfamiliar  to  him.  Lassitude  is  as  unknown 
to  Faguet  as  it  was  to  Shelley's  "Skylark."  His  curiosity 
is  always  awake;  no  shadow  of  satiety  ever  comes  near 
him.  He  w^as  a  Titan  in  his  way,  but  never  a  "weary 
Titan  ";  he  never  felt  "the  orb  of  his  fate,"  though  it  em- 
braced so  much,  to  be  "too  vast."  The  more  elaborate  or 
complex  an  author  was,  the  more  actively  and  ingeniously 
Faguet  penetrated  his  work,  smoothing  out  the  com- 
plexities, throwing  light  into  every  dark  corner.  But  it 
is  very  proper  to  notice  that  even  where  he  devotes  him- 
self with  what  seems  the  most  absorbing  care  to  the 
investigation  of  a  particular  mind,  he  is  always  essentially 
detached  from  it,  always  ready  to  quit  one  tenement  of 
genius  and  adapt  himself  with  alacrity  to  another,  like  a 
soldier-crab,  whose  tender  extremity  will  fit  itself  to  any 
shell-habitation. 

In  one  of  his  criticisms  of  Montesquieu — ^and  on  no 
French  classic  has  he  been  more  constantly  felicitous — 
Faguet  speaks  of  the  faculty  possessed  by  that  prince  of 
intelligence  of  wandering  among  souls,  and  of  studying 
their  spiritual  experience  "comme  un  anatomiste  ^tudie  le 
jeu  des  organes."  The  author  of  the  Esprit  des  Lois  took 
wide  views  and  surveyed  a  vast  expanse  of  society,  but  he 
was  equally  apt  to  map  out  a  square  inch  of  mossy  rock 
at  his  feet.  "II  a  du  reste  beaucoup  ecrit,  comme  en 
marge  de  ses  grands  livres."  These  words  remind  us  of 
a  section  of  Emile  Faguet's  writings  which  is  peculiarly 
stimulating  and  useful.  It  is  illustrated  to  great  perfec- 
tion in  what  is  perhaps  the  most  fascinating  specimen  of 
his  vast  and  various  production,  the  volume  called  En 
lisant  les  Beaux  Vieux  Livres,  which  he  published  so 
lately  as  191 1.     This  was  followed  by  En  lisant  Corneille 

209 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

in  1913  and  En  lisant  Mulicre  in  1914.  If  the  war  had 
not  intervened  and  if  his  own  heahh  had  not  failed  him, 
it  is  probable  that  Faguet  would  have  extended  and 
developed  this  section  of  his  work,  which  exhibited  the 
ripest  fruit  of  his  subtle  and  vigorous  criticism. 

The  method  which  he  adopted  in  these  treatises  was 
to  take  a  portion  of  a  well-known  book  or  a  short  poem, 
and  read  it  with  his  imaginary  audience  exactly  as  though 
they,  and  he,  had  never  met  with  it  before.  In  En  lisant 
les  Beaux  Vieux  Livres  he  takes  a  score  of  such  passages, 
and  analyses  them  without  pedantry,  eagerly,  curiously, 
cordially.  He  explains  what  the  author  meant,  shows 
how  he  has  succeeded  in  expressing  his  meaning,  points 
out  the  ingenuities  of  thought  and  the  felicities  of  lan- 
guage, and  in  short  exhibits  the  piece  of  hackneyed  prose 
or  verse  as  though  it  had  just  been  discovered.  The 
process  may  sound  perfunctory  and  pedagogic,  but, 
conducted  as  Faguet  conducts  them,  these  little  excursions 
are  not  less  delightful  than  original.  He  takes  things  that 
everybody  knows — such  as  Montaigne  on  Friendship,  or 
Bossuet  on  the  Romans,  or  a  couple  of  La  Bruyere's  por- 
traits; he  takes  a  long  poem,  like  Alfred  de  Vigny's  La 
Maison  du  Berger,  or  a  short  lyric,  like  Victor  Hugo's 
Le  Semeur;  he  takes  the  character  of  S^v^re  in 
Polyeucte  or  a  landscape  out  of  the  memoirs  of  Chateau- 
briand, and  he  illuminates  these  familiar  things  until  the 
reader  not  merely  sees  in  them  what  he  never  saw  before, 
but  has  gained  a  method  of  reading  by  which  he  will  in 
future  extract  infinite  new  pleasures  from  re-reading  old 
familiar  books. 

In  this  system  of  analysis  by  conversation  consists  the 
chief  originality  of  Faguet's  criticism.  The  idea  of  it  was 
not  entirely  new ;  so  long  ago  as  the  seventeenth  century 
Descartes  said  that  "la  lecture  est  une  conversation  con- 
tinue avec  les  plus  honnetes  gens  des  si^cles  passes."  But 
it  had  not  been  planned  on  a  practical  basis  until  Faguet 
sketched  out  these  enchanting  books  of  his,  in  which  we 
seem  to  see  him  seated,  smiling,  at  a  table,  the  volume 
open  before  him,  expounding  it  to  an  eager  circle  of  in- 

2IO 


Two  French  Critics 

telligent  young  people.  In  these  conversations,  Faguet 
had  not  the  weight  of  Bruneti^re  or  the  sparkle  of 
Lemaitre;  he  was  simpler  than  the  one  and  soberer  than 
the  other.  He  achieved  the  dream  of  the  teacher  when 
he  discovered  how  to  write  books  which  please  and  are 
useful  at  the  same  time.  He  avoided,  by  a  whole  con- 
tinent, the  vapid  dreariness  of  the  usual  English  manual, 
which  looks  upon  the  rose  of  Sharon  and  the  lily  of  the 
valley  as  fit  only  to  be  pressed  between  sheets  of  blotting- 
paper  in  a  hortus  siccus.  Faguet  is  always  in  earnest, 
although  he  sometimes  indulges  in  immense  humour  and 
vivacity,  not  of  the  Parisian  variety,  but  highly  exhilarat- 
ing. When  he  suddenly  confesses  to  us  that  Balzac  had 
"the  temperament  of  an  artist  and  the  soul  of  a  commercial 
traveller,"  or  when  he  sums  up  an  entirely  grave  summary 
of  Pindare-Le  Brun  by  telling  us  that  "c'etait  un  homme 
de  beaucoup  d'esprit,  d'un  caract^re  tr^s  meprisable,  et 
excellent  ouvrier  de  vers,"  it  is  no  schoolmaster  that  speaks 
to  pupils,  but  a  friend  who  takes  his  intimates  into  his 
confidence. 

It  has  been  the  habit  to  depreciate  the  style  of  Faguet, 
which  indeed  does  not  set  out  to  be  exquisite,  and  cannot 
compare  with  those  of  several  of  his  great  predecessors. 
He  has  been  charged,  in  his  zeal  for  the  matter  of  litera- 
ture, with  a  neglect  of  its  form.  It  is  true  that  his  phrases 
are  apt  to  be  curt;  he  gives  little  attention  to  the  conduct 
of  a  sentence,  further  than  to  define  in  it  his  precise  inten- 
tion. But  his  criticism  has  a  great  purity  of  design,  which 
is  in  itself  an  element  of  style.  It  sets  forth  to  accomplish 
a  certain  purpose  and  it  carries  out  this  aim  with  the  utmost 
economy  of  means.  No  writer  less  than  Faguet,  to  use  a 
vulgar  expression,  "slops  about  all  over  the  shop."  He 
has  at  least  this  negative  beauty  of  writing,  and  he  adds 
to  it  another,  the  gift  of  discussing  great  authors  in  a  tone 
that  is  in  sympathy  with  their  peculiarities.  An  instance 
of  this,  among  a  hundred,  may  be  cited  from  his  Dix- 
huitieme  Siecle ;  summing  up  what  he  has  to  impress  upon 
us  about  Marivaux,  he  defines  that  author  in  these  terms  : 
"C'est  un  pr^cieux  qui  est  assez  rare  et  qu'on  s'interdit  de 

211 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

condamner  au  moment  meme  qu'on  le  d^sapprouve,  parce 
qu'on  n'est  pas  sans  en  jouir  dans  le  moment  m6me  qu'on 
en  souffre."  It  would  hardly  be  possible  to  put  more  of 
critical  value  into  so  few  words,  but  moreover  it  is  said 
as  Marivaux  himself  might  say  it. 

Faguet  had  his  prejudices,  as  every  honest  man  may 
have.  He  adored  the  seventeenth  and  he  loved  the  nine- 
teenth centuries,  but  he  had  almost  an  aversion  from  the 
eighteenth.  He  put  Buffon  first  among  the  writers  of 
that  age,  and  Montesquieu  next;  so  loyal  a  spirit  as 
F"aguet's  could  not  but  be  cordially  attracted  by  Vau- 
venargues.  But  the  lack  of  poetry,  and,  as  he  asserted, 
the  lack  of  philosophy  of  the  Encyclopaedists  annoyed  him, 
and  for  their  greatest  name,  for  Voltaire,  he  had  a  positive 
hatred.  Faguet  found  it  difficult  to  be  just  to  Diderot, 
and  difficult  to  tolerate  Rousseau,  but  to  love  Voltaire  he 
made  no  effort  whatever ;  he  acknowledged  that  feat  to  be 
impossible.  He  did  not  fear  to  contradict  himself,  and 
about  Rousseau  his  opinion  grew  steadily  more  favour- 
able, until,  in  1913,  he  positively  published  five  inde- 
pendent volumes  on  this  one  writer  alone.  But  Faguet 
could  never  persuade  himself  to  approach  Voltaire  with 
any  face  but  a  wry  one.  Yet,  even  here,  his  antipathy  is 
scarcely  to  be  perceived  on  the  surface.  Faguet  always 
leaves  the  judgment  of  his  reader  independent.  He  puts 
the  facts  before  him ;  his  own  irony  marks  the  line  of 
thought  which  he  suggests;  but  he  is  careful  never  to 
attempt  to  bully  the  reader  into  acceptance.  Bruneti^re 
is  apt  to  be  vociferous  in  persuasion ;  Faguet  never  raises 
his  voice. 

In  1899,  being  called  upon  to  sum  up  the  qualities  of 
the  leading  French  critics  from  1850  onwards,  Faguet 
found  himself  confronted  with  his  own  name  and  work. 
It  was  characteristic  of  his  candour  and  simplicity  that 
he  did  not  shrink  from  the  task  of  describing  himself,  and 
that  he  undertook  it  without  false  modesty  or  affectation. 
When  he  comes  to  describe  Emile  Faguet  he  is  as  de- 
tached, as  calmly  analytic,  as  he  is  when  he  speaks  of 
Th^ophile  Gautier  or  M.  Ren^  Doumic.     He  defines  the 

212 


Two  French  Critics 

qualities,  acknowledges  the  limitations,  and  hints  at  the 
faults  of  his  subject.  I  do  not  know  a  case  in  all  literary 
history  where  a  writer  has  spoken  of  himself  in  terms 
more  severely  judicial.  He  closes  this  remarkable  little 
study  with  words  which  we  may  quote  here  for  their 
curious  personal  interest  no  less  than  as  an  example  of 
Faguet's  style  : 

Laborieux,  du  reste,  assez  m^thodique,  consciencieux,  en 
poussant  la  conscience  jusqu'i  etre  peu  bienveillant,  ou  en  nc 
sachant  pas  pousser  le  scrupule  consciencieux  jusqu'i  la 
bienveillance,  11  a  pu  rendre  et  il  a  rendu  des  services  appr^- 
ciables  aux  ^tudiants  en  litt^rature,  qui  ^taient  le  public  qu'il 
a  toujours  vise.  Sans  abandonner  la  critique,  qu'il  est  k  croirc 
qu'il  aimera  toujours,  il  s'est  un  peu  tourn6  depuls  quelques 
annees  du  cote  des  etudes  sociolog'iques,  ou  c'est  a  d'autres 
qu'a  nous  qu'il  appartient  d'apprdcier  ses  efforts. 

In  this  connexion  a  phrase  of  the  great  critic  may  be 
recalled.  When  the  war  broke  out  in  19 14,  someone  who 
knew  Faguet's  absorbing  love  of  books  sympathized  with 
him  on  the  blow  to  literature.  He  responded,  in  a  tone 
of  reproof,  "L'avenir  national  est  une  chose  autrement 
importante  que  I'avenir  litteraire." 

Those  sociological  interests  were  steadily  emphasized. 
Faguet  became,  not  less  in  love  with  great  books,  but 
more  inclined  to  turn  from  their  technical  to  their  ethical 
value.  He  became  himself  a  moralist,  after  having  in  so 
many  eloquent  volumes  analysed  the  works  and  the 
characters  of  the  politicians  and  teachers  of  the  nineteenth 
century.  He  possessed  a  finished  faculty  for  amusing  and 
pleasing  while  he  instructed,  and  it  was  remarkable  that 
in  these  treatises  of  his  late  middle  life  he  addressed  a 
much  wider  public  than  he  had  ever  reached  before.  His 
Commentaire  du  Discours  sur  les  Passions  was  a  link 
between  the  earlier  purely  literary  treatises  and  the  later 
analyses  of  psychological  phenomena,  but  it  was  highly 
successful.  Even  more  universally  popular  were  the  little 
books  on  Friendship  and  Old  Age,  which  enjoyed  a 
larger  circulation  than  any  other  contemporary  works  of 
o  213 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

their  class.  Faguet  was  pleased  at  his  popularity,  and 
felt  that  he  was  recognized  as  belonging  to  that  "vicille 
race  de  moral istes  exacts  et  fins "  of  whom  La  Roche- 
foucauld had  been  the  precursor.  Of  these  moral  studies, 
the  most  abundantly  discussed  was  that  which  dealt  with 
Le  Culte  de  l' Incompetence  (igio),  a  book  which  bears 
a  very  remarkable  relation  to  the  state  of  France  when  war 
broke  out. 

Towards  the  end  of  his  life,  Faguet  became  a  great 
power  in  France.  He  exercised,  from  that  book-bewil- 
dered room  in  the  Rue  Monge,  a  patriotic,  amiable, 
fraternal  influence  which  permeated  every  corner  of  the 
French-speaking  world.  But  his  health,  which  had  long 
been  failing,  gave  way  under  the  strain  of  the  war.  He 
had  never  given  himself  any  rest  from  perpetual  literary 
labour,  and  he  had  always  said  that  he  knew  that  before 
he  was  seventy  years  of  age  he  should  be  "buried  and 
forgotten."  A  third  stroke  of  paralysis  carried  away  the 
greatest  living  friend  of  literature  in  France  on  the  7th  of 
June,  1916,  in  his  sixty-ninth  year.  Buried  he  is  at  last, 
to  their  sorrow,  but  his  compatriots  will  not  readily  forget 
him. 

It  is  not  easy  to  find  common  terms  in  which  to 
describe  Faguet  and  his  remarkable  contemporary,  Remy 
de  Gourmont.  Their  two  circles  of  influence  were  far- 
reaching,  but  did  not  touch.  In  the  very  extensive  litera- 
ture of  each  the  other  is  perhaps  never  mentioned.  We 
may  suppose  that  it  would  be  almost  impossible  for  a 
French  observer  to  review  them  together  without  allow- 
ing the  scale  to  descend  in  favour  of  this  name  or  of  that. 
But  here  may  come  in  the  use  of  foreign  criticism,  which 
regards  the  whole  field  from  a  great  distance,  and  without 
passion.  The  contrast  between  these  two  writers,  both 
honest,  laborious  and  fruitful,  both  absorbed  in  and  sub- 
merged by  literature,  both  eager  to  discover  truth  in  all 
directions,  was  yet  greater  than  their  similarity.  We  have 
briefly  observed  in  Faguet  the  university  professor,  the 
great  public  interpreter  of  masterpieces.  In  Remy  de 
Gourmont,  on  the  other  hand,    we  meet   the   man   who, 

214 


Two  French  Critics 

scornful  of  mediocrity  and  tolerant  of  nothing  but  what 
is  exquisite,  stands  apart  from  the  crowd,  and  will  scarcely 
share  his  dream  with  a  disciple.  Faguet,  like  a  Lord 
Chancellor  of  Letters,  is  versed  in  all  the  legislation  of  the 
mind,  and  lives  in  a  perpetual  elucidation  of  it.  Gour- 
mont,  standing  in  the  outer  court,  attracts  the  young  and 
the  audacious  around  him  by  protesting  that  no  laws  exist 
save  those  which  are  founded  on  an  artist's  own  eclecti- 
cism. Together,  or  rather  back  to  back,  they  addressed 
almost  everyone  who  was  intelligent  in  France  between 
1895  ^ri^  1914- 

We  have  .seen  in  Emile  Faguet  a  typical  member  of 
the  middle  class.  Remy  de  Gourmont  was  an  aristocrat 
both  by  descent  and  by  temperament.  He  was  born  on 
the  4th  of  April,  1858,  in  the  chateau  of  La  Motte,  near 
Bazoches-en-Houlme,  in  the  Orne ;  during  his  childhood 
his  parents  moved  to  a  still  more  romantic  little  manor- 
house  at  INIesnil-Villement.  These  Norman  landscapes 
are  constantly  introduced  into  Gourmont's  stories.  His 
race  was  of  considerable  antiquity  and  distinction ;  his 
mother  traced  her  descent  from  the  great  poet,  Malherbe ; 
a  paternal  ancestor  was  that  Gilles  de  Gourmont  who 
printed  in  France  the  earliest  books  in  Greek  and  in 
Hebrew  character.  A  passion  for  the  Muses,  like  a  fra- 
grant atmosphere,  surrounded  the  boy  from  his  cradle. 
He  arrived  in  Paris  at  the  age  of  twenty-five,  provincially 
instructed,  but  already  of  a  marvellous  erudition.  He 
was  appointed  assistant  librarian  at  the  Bibliotheque 
Nationale,  where  for  eight  years  he  browsed  at  will  on 
all  the  secret  and  forgotten  wonders  of  the  past,  indulging 
to  the  full  an  insatiable  literary  curiosity.  In  1890  he 
published  a  novel,  Sixtine,  a  sort  of  diary  of  a  very  com- 
plicated mind  which  believes  itself  to  be  in  love,  but 
cannot  be  quite  sure.  It  was  "cerebral,"  without  action 
of  any  kind,  an  absurd  book,  but  ingeniously — too  in- 
geniously— written.  The  historic  interest  of  Sixtine  rests 
in  the  fact  that  it  led  the  reaction  against  the  naturalism 
of  Zola  and  the  pyschology  of  M.  Paul  Bourget.  Gour- 
mont now  achieved  a  single  English  reader,   for  Sixtine 

215 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

was  read  by  Henry  James,  but  with  more  curiosity  than 
approval. 

Althouf^h  hardly  a  bool<  of  permanent  value,  Sixline 
had  a  lasting  effect  on  the  career  of  its  author.  It  ex- 
pressed with  remarkable  exactitude  the  sentiments  of  the 
group  of  young  men  who  were  now  coming  to  the  front 
in  France.  Gourmont  became  the  champion  of  the 
"vaporeux,  nuance  et  sublimise  "  literature  which  started 
about  1890.  He  accepted  "symbolism,"  and  he  became 
the  leader  of  the  symbolist  movement,  of  which  his  stern 
mental  training  and  curious  erudition  permitted  him  to  be 
the  brain.  He  was  the  prophet  of  Mallarm6,  of  Verlaine, 
of  Maeterlinck,  of  Huysmans,  and  at  the  same  time  he 
welcomed  each  younger  revolutionary.  All  this,  of  course, 
was  not  done  in  a  day,  but  reconciliation  with  the  intel- 
lectual conventions  was  made  impossible  by  a  fact  which 
must  not  be  ignored  in  any  sketch  of  Remv  de  Gourmont, 
and  indeed  ought  to  be  faced  with  resolution.  In  i8gi 
he  was  dismissed  from  the  public  service  and  from  the 
Library,  for  an  article  which  he  published  entitled  Le 
Joujou  Patriotisme,  in  which  he  poured  contempt  upon 
the  Army,  and  openly  advocated  the  abandonment  of  any 
idea  of  the  "Revanche."  The  chastisement  was  a  severe 
one,  and  had  an  effect  on  the  whole  remainder  of  Gour- 
mont's  life.  About  the  same  time  his  health  gave  way, 
and  excluded  him  from  all  society,  for  he  was  invaded  by 
an  unsightly  growth  in  the  face.  His  hermitage  was 
high  up  in  an  old  house  in  the  Rue  des  Saints  P6res,  near 
the  quay,  and  there  he  sat,  day  in,  day  out,  surrounded 
by  his  books,  in  solitude,  a  monk  of  literature. 

For  the  next  eight  or  nine  years,  Gourmont,  aban- 
doning politics,  in  which  he  had  made  so  luckless  an 
adventure,  devoted  himself  exclusively  to  art  and  letters. 
He  joined  the  staff  of  the  Mercure  de  France;  and  under 
its  director,  and  his  life-long  friend,  M.  Vallette,  he  took 
part  in  all  the  symbolist  polemics  of  the  hour.  He  de- 
fended each  new  man  of  merit  with  his  active  partisanship; 
he  wrote  ceaselessly;  verse,  art  criticism,  humanism, 
novels,  every  species  of  fantastic  and  esoteric  literature 

216 


Two  French  Critics 

flowed  from  his  abundant  pen.  These  books,  many  of 
them  preposterous  in  their  shape,  "limited  editions"  pro- 
duced in  conditions  of  archiepiscopal  splendour  of  bind- 
ing and  type,  possess,  it  must  be  admitted,  little  positive 
value.  They  are  blossoms  in  the  flower-garden  of  that 
heyday  of  sensuous  "symbolism,"  of  which  we  had  a 
pale  reflection  in  our  London  Yellow  Books  and  Savoy 
Reviews.  The  most  interesting  of  the  publications  of 
Remy  de  Gourmont  during  these  feverish  years  is  the  little 
volume  called  L'Idealisme  (1893),  ^^  which  he  sought  to 
restore  to  the  word  "id^al  "  what  he  called  its  "aristocratic 
value."  A  passage  may  be  quoted  from  an  essay  in  this 
elegant  and  ridiculous  treatise,  on  the  beauty  of  words, 
irrespective  of  their  meaning  : 

Quelles  realites  me  donneront  les  saveurs  que  je  r^ve  h  ce 
fruit  de  I'lnde  et  des  songes,  le  myrobolan, — ou  les  couleurs 
royales  dont  je  pare  I'omphax,  ou  ses  lointaines  gloires? 

Quelle  musique  est  comparable  k  la  sonority  pure  des  mots 
obscurs,  6  cyclamor?  Et  quelle  odeur  k  tes  Emanations 
vierg-es,  6  sanguisorbe? 

Stevenson — the  R.L.S.  of  "Penny  plain  and  Twopence 
coloured  " — would  have  delighted  in  this. 

Gourmont  became  tired  of  symbolism  rather  suddenly, 
and  he  buried  it  in  two  volumes  which  were  the  best  he 
had  yet  published  :  the  Livres  des  Masques  of  1896  and 
1898.  These  have  a  lasting  value  as  documents,  and  they 
mark  the  beginning  of  the  author's  permanent  work  as  a 
critic  of  letters.  In  them  he  insisted  on  the  warning  not 
to  let  new  genius  pass  ungreeted  because  it  was  eccentric- 
ally draped  or  unfamiliarly  featured.  These  two  volumes 
are  a  precious  indication  of  what  French  independent 
literature  was  at  the  very  close  of  the  Tiineteenth  century, 
and  it  is  interesting  after  twenty  years  of  development  and 
change  to  note  how  few  mistakes  Remy  de  Gourmont 
made  in  his  characterization  of  types.  He  took  a  central 
place  among  these  symbolists,  grouping  around  him  the 
men   of   genuine   talent,    repulsing   pretenders   who  were 

217 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

charlatans  and  discouraging  mere  imitators;  marshalling, 
in  short,  a  ferocious  little  army  of  genius  in  its  attack 
upon  the  conventions  and  the  traditions  of  the  age.  Time 
rolls  its  wheel,  and  it  is  amusing  to  notice  that  several  of 
these  fierce  young  revolutionaries  are  now  members  of  the 
French  Academy. 

At  the  close  of  the  century  Remy  de  Gourmont  aban- 
doned symbolism,  and  the  world  of  ideas  took  possession 
of  him.  He  plunged  deeper  into  the  study  of  philosophy, 
grammar,  and  history,  and  he  explored  new  provinces  of 
knowledge,  particularly  in  the  direction  of  ethnography 
and  biology.  In  the  midst  of  this  acquisitive  labour  he 
was  stirred  to  the  composition  of  one  remarkable  work 
after  another,  and  to  this  period  belong  the  four  successive 
publications,  which,  in  the  whole  of  Gourmont's  vast  pro- 
duction, stand  out  as  the  most  interesting  and  important 
which  he  has  written.  His  reputation  stands  four-square 
on  L'Esthetique  de  la  Langue  Frangaise  (1899),  La  Culture 
des  Idees  (1900),  Le  Chemin  de  Velours  (1902),  and  Le 
Probleme  du  Style  (1902).  During  the  thirteen  years 
which  followed  he  wrote  incessantly,  and  the  widening 
circle  of  his  admirers  always  found  much  to  praise  in  what 
he  produced.  But  now  that  we  see  his  life-work  as  a 
whole  it  seems  more  and  more  plain  that  he  revealed  his 
genius  freshly  and  fully  in  these  four  books  of  his  prime, 
and  in  a  world  so  crowded  as  ours  the  reader  who  has  much 
to  attract  him  may  be  recommended  to  these  as  broad  and 
perhaps  sufficient  exponents  of  the  character  of  Gourmont's 
teaching. 

It  has  been  said  by  one  of  his  earliest  associates,  M. 
Louis  Dumur,  that  Gourmont  was  always  "le  bon  chasseur 
du  mensonge  humain."  This  is  a  friendly  way  of  describ- 
ing his  intellectual  dogmatism  and  his  restless  habit  of 
analysis.  He  took  nothing  for  granted,  and,  whether  he 
desired  to  be  so  or  not,  he  was  a  destructive  force.  He 
describes  himself,  in  one  of  his  rather  rare  paragraphs 
of  self-portraiture,  as  "un  esprit  d^sint6ress6  de  tout,  et 
int6ress6  a  tout,"  and  this  very  accurately  defines  his  atti- 
tude.    He  strikes  us  as  ceaselessly  hovering  over  hitherto 

218 


Two  French  Critics 

uncontested  facts  in  the  passionate  desire  of  proving  them 
to  be  fallacies.  The  epithet  "paradoxical,"  which  is  often 
misapplied,  appears  to  be  exactly  appropriate  to  the  method 
of  Remy  de  Gourmont,  which  starts  by  denying  the  truth 
of  something  which  everybody  has  taken  for  granted,  and 
then  supporting  the  reversed  position  by  rapid  and  in- 
genious argument.  He  is  unable  to  accept  any  convention 
until  he  has  resolutely  turned  it  inside  out,  examined  it  in 
every  hostile  light,  and  so  dusted  and  furbished  it  that  it 
has  ceased  to  be  conventional.  He  was  indefatigable  in 
these  researches,  and  so  ingenious  as  to  be  often  be- 
wildering and  occasionally  tiresome. 

He  has  left  no  book  more  characteristic  than  Le 
Chemin  de  Velours,  which  he  called  a  study  in  the  disso- 
ciation of  ideas.  He  chose  a  very  illuminating  tag  from 
Pascal  as  his  motto  :  "ni  la  contradiction  n'est  marque  de 
faussete,  ni  I'incontradiction  n'est  marque  de  verity." 
The  whole  treatise  is  a  comparison  between  the  Jansenist 
and  the  Jesuit  system  of  morals,  as  revealed  in  the 
Provincial  Letters.  Like  many  Frenchmen  of  recent 
years,  Remy  de  Gourmont  liked  religion  to  be  cham- 
pioned, but  never  by  a  believer.  Neither  Port  Royal  nor 
the  Society  of  Jesus  would  thank  him  for  his  disinterested 
support,  but  he  defends  them,  alternately  and  destruc- 
tively, with  an  immense  fund  of  vivacity.  No  one  has 
defined  more  luminously  the  evangelical  doctrine  of 
Jansenius,  Bishop  of  Ypres,  and  for  a  while  the  reader 
thinks  that  the  balance  will  descend  on  the  Jansenist  side. 
But  Gourmont  is  scandalized  to  see  Calvinism  banging  the 
door  of  salvation  in  people's  faces,  while  he  applauds  the 
humanity  of  the  Jesuits  in  holding  it  wide  open,  and  in 
spreading  between  birth  and  death  a  velvet  carpet  for 
delicate  souls.  He  analyses  the  works  of  Sarrasa,  a 
Flemish  Jesuit,  who  in  1618  produced  an  Ars  semper 
gaudendi  which  was,  according  to  Gourmont,  neither  more 
nor  less  than  a  treatise  on  the  way  to  make  the  best  of  both 
worlds.  Gourmont  was  endlessly  amused  by  the  indis- 
creet admissions  of  Father  Sarrasa. 

Nevertheless,  the  Jesuit  type  shocked  him  more  than 

219 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

the  Jansenist.  He  admired  the  logical  penetration  of 
Pascal,  his  rigidity  of  thought,  liis  unalterable  ideal  of 
duty,  more  than  the  easy-going  casuistry  of  his  opponents. 
Me  thought  that  Protestantism,  which  rests  on  abstraction, 
was  a  purer  type  of  religion  than  the  mitigated  and 
humanized  Christianity  of  Catholicism.  But  he  was 
irritated  by  the  way  in  which  Port  Royal  pushed  their 
spiritual  logic  to  extremes,  and  he  dared  to  suggest  that 
Pascal  would  have  been  a  better  and  a  more  useful  man 
if  he  had  consented  to  be  less  holy.  Gourmont  speculated 
ingeniously  what  would  have  been  the  future  of  philoso- 
phical literature  if  Pascal,  instead  of  retiring  to  Port 
Royal,  had  joined  Descartes  in  Holland.  On  the  whole 
he  decides  against  the  Jansenists,  because  although  he  sees 
that  thev  were  noble  he  suspects  ilit,m  of  being  inhuman, 
and  of  laying  intolerable  and  needless  burdens  upon  the 
spirit  of  man.  Remy  de  Gourmont  considered  evangelical 
Christianity  an  Oriental  religion,  not  well  fitted  for  Latin 
Europe.  In  all  the  schisms  and  heresies  of  the  churches 
he  thought  he  saw  the  Western  mind  revolting  against  a 
dogmatism  which  came  from  Jerusalem.  The  Jansenist 
is  a  pessimist;  the  Jesuit,  on  the  other  hand,  cultivates 
optimism ;  he  pretends,  at  all  events,  that  the  soul  should 
be  free  and  jovous,  to  which  end  he  rolls  out  his  velvet 
road  towards  salvation.  Remy  de  Gourmont  concludes 
that  the  final  effect  of  Les  Provinciales  is  to  make  the 
reader  love  the  Jesuits,  and  when  he  comes  to  sum  up  the 
matter  he  is  on  the  side  of  the  Society,  because  nothing 
wounds  a  civilized  man  so  deeply  as  the  negation  of  his 
free  will.  It  will  be  seen  that  neither  party  gains  much 
from  his  sardonic  and  fugitive  approbation. 

After  1902  a  further  transformation  began  to  be  visible 
in  the  genius  of  Remy  de  Gourmont.  An  improvement  in 
his  health  permitted  him  to  mingle  a  little  with  other 
human  beings,  and  to  become  less  exclusively  an  anchorite 
of  the  intellect.  Having  pushed  his  individualist  theories 
to  their  extreme,  he  withdrew  from  his  violent  expression 
of  them,  and  he  took  a  new  and  pleasing  interest  in  public 
life.     He  continued  to  seek  consolation  for  the  disappoint- 

220 


Two  French  Critics 

ments  of  art  in  philosophy  and  science,  and  he  developed 
a  positive  passion  for  ideas.  He  founded  the  Revue  des 
Idees,  which  had  a  considerable  vogue  in  the  intellectual 
world.  But  his  chief  activity  hencefor\vard  was  as  a 
publicist.  His  incessant  short  essays,  mainly  published 
in  the  Mercure  de  France,  became  an  element  in  the  life 
of  thousands  of  cultivated  readers.  They  dealt  briefly 
with  questions  of  the  day,  concerning  all  that  can  arrest 
the  attention  of  an  educated  man  or  woman.  The  author 
collected  them  in  volumes  which  present  the  quintessence 
of  his  later  manner,  four  of  Epilogues,  three  of 
Promenades  Litteraires,  three  of  Promenades  Philo- 
sophiques,  and  so  forth.  These  dogmatic  expressions  of 
his  conception  of  life  were  written  in  a  style  more  fluid, 
more  buoyant,  and  less  obscure  than  he  had  previously 
used,  and  they  achieved  a  great  popularity,  especially 
among  women.  Meantime,  as  a  critic,  he  showed  less  and 
less  interest  in  the  exceptional  and  the  unwholesome,  of 
which  he  had  been  the  fantastic  defender,  and  more  in  the 
great  standard  authors  of  France.  In  1905  he  opened  with 
an  anthology  from  G6rard  de  Nerval  a  series  of  Les  Plus 
Belles  Pages,  which  he  continued  until  the  war  with 
admirable  judgment. 

The  war  found  Remy  de  Gourmont  not  totally  un- 
prepared. He  had  always  unflinchingly  avowed  himself 
an  aristocrat  and  an  anarchist ;  it  was  his  way  of  expressing 
his  horror  at  vulgarity  and  tyranny.  He  had  chosen  to 
be  disconcerting  in  his  vindictive  pursuit  of  sentimentality 
and  folly.  He  had  thought  it  fitting  to  be  a  determined 
enemy  to  militarism.  It  was  difficult  for  a  critic  with  so 
fine  an  ear  as  his  to  tolerate  patriotic  verses  which  did  not 
scan.  But  the  ripening  years  had  sobered  him,  and  he 
made  after  191 1  a  much  more  careful  examination  of  the 
destiny  of  his  country.  He  saw  that  with  all  his 
scepticism  he  had  been  the  dupe  of  Teutonic  culture,  and 
he  repudiated  the  Nietzsche  whom  he  had  done  so  much 
to  introduce  to  Parisian  readers.  From  August,  1914, 
Remv  de  Gourmont  put  aside  all  his  literary  and  scientific 
work,  and  devoted  himself  wholly  to  a  patriotic  comment 

221 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

on  the  war.  His  sliort  articles  in  La  France  form  an 
admirable  volume,  Pendant  VOrage,  by  which  all  his 
petulance  in  times  of  peace  is  more  than  redeemed.  The 
anguish  of  the  struggle  killed  him,  as  it  had  killed  so  many 
others.  Remy  de  Gourmont  was  seated  at  his  writing- 
table,  with  a  protest  against  the  outrage  upon  Reims  half- 
completed  before  him,  when  a  stroke  of  apoplexy  put  an 
instant  period  to  his  life.  This  was  on  the  29th  of 
September,    1915. 

In  one  of  his  best  books,  Le  Prohleme  du  Style  (1902), 
Remy  de  Gourmont  remarks  in  his  aphoristic  way,  "II  y  a 
une  forme  g^nc^rale  de  la  sensibility  qui  s'impose  k  tous  les 
hommes  d'une  meme  periode."  This  is  excessive  in  its 
application,  but  it  is  sufficiently  true  to  be  a  useful  guide 
to  the  historian.  Between  1890  and  1905  there  was  ex- 
hibited, not  merely  in  France  and  England,  but  all  over 
Europe,  a  "general  form  of  sensibility"  of  which  Gour- 
mont was  the  ablest,  the  most  vociferous,  and  the  most 
ingenious  representative.  It  is  important  to  try  to  analyse 
this  condition  or  fashion  of  taste,  since,  although  it  has 
already  passed  into  the  region  of  things  gone  by  and  of 
"les  neiges  d'antan,"  it  has  not  ceased  to  be  memorable. 
Our  comprehension  of  it  is  not  helped  by  ticketing  it 
"decadent  "  or  "unhealthy,"  for  those  are  empty  adjectives 
of  prejudice.  What  was  really  involved  in  it  was  a  revolt 
against  sentimentality  and  against  the  tendency  to  repeat 
with  complacency  the  outworn  traditions  of  art.  This  was 
its  negative  side,  worthy  of  all  encouragement.  What  was 
not  quite  so  certainly  meritorious  was  its  positive  action. 
It  was  a  demand  for  an  exclusively  personal  aesthetic,  for 
an  art  severely  divorced  from  all  emotions  except  the 
purely  intellectual  ones,  the  sensuousness  of  this  school  of 
writers  being  essentially  cerebral.  It  descended  in 
England  from  Walter  Pater,  in  France  from  Baudelaire, 
and  it  aimed  at  a  supreme  delicacy  of  execution,  an 
exquisite  avoidance  of  everything  vulgar  and  second- 
hand. The  young  men  who  fought  for  it  considered  that 
the  only  thing  essential  was  to  achieve  what  they  called  a 
"personal  vision  "  of  life.     In  the  pursuit  of  it  they  were 


Two  French  Critics 

willing-  to  be  candid  at  the  risk  of  perversity,  while  they 
obstinately  denied  that  there  should  be  any  relation 
between  art  and  morals.  But  Remy  de  Gourmont,  who 
had  been  their  leader  in  aiming  at  an  impossible  perfection, 
lived  long  enough  to  see  the  whole  intellect  and  con- 
science of  France  pressing  along  a  path  to  greatness  which 
he  and  his  disciples  had  never  perceived  in  all  the 
excursions  of  their  imagination. 

1916. 


22"^ 


THE    WRITINGS    OF    M.    CLEMENCEAU 

IN  the  year  1893,  after  a  succession  of  events  which  are 
still  remembered  with  emotion,  M.  Clemenceau  fell 
from  political  eminence,  not  gradually  or  by  transi- 
tions of  decay,  but  with  theatrical  suddenness  like  that  of  a 
Lucifer  "hurled  headlong-  flaming  from  the  letherial  sky." 
His  enemies,  rewarded  beyond  their  extreme  hopes,  gazed 
down  into  the  abyss  and  thought  that  they  discerned  his 
"cadavre  politique  "  lying  motionless  at  the  bottom. 
They  rejoiced  to  believe  that  he  would  trouble  them  no 
more.  He  had  passed  the  age  of  fifty  years,  and  all  his 
hopes  were  broken,  all  his  ambitions  shattered.  They 
rubbed  their  hands  together,  and  smiled;  "we  shall  hear 
no  more  of  him!  "  But  they  did  not  know  with  what 
manner  of  man  they  were  dealing.  What  though  the  field 
was  lost  ?     All  was  not  lost : 

The  unconquerable  Will, 
And  study  of  revenge,  immortal  hate, 
And  courag-e  never  to   submit  or  yield ; 
And  what  is  else  not  to  be  overcome? 

So  brilliant  an  array  of  mingled  intelligence,  per- 
tinacity, vigour,  and  high  spirits  have  rarely  been  seen 
united,  and  the  possessor  of  these  qualities  was  not  likely 
to  be  silenced  by  the  most  formidable  junta  of  intriguers. 
As  a  matter  of  fact,  he  turned  instantly  to  a  new  sphere 
of  action,  and  became  the  man  of  letters  of  whom  I 
propose  to  speak  in  these  pages.  But  for  his  catastrophe 
in  1893,  it  is  probable  that  M.  Clemenceau  would  never 
have  become  an  author. 

A  brief  summary  of  his  early  life  is  needed  to  bring  the 
series  of   his  published  works  into  due   relief.     Georges 

225 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

Clemenceau  was  the  second  son  of  a  family  of  six;  he  was 
born  on  the  28th  of  September,  1841,  and  was  therefore  a 
little  younger  than  Joseph  Chamberlain  and  Lord  Morley, 
and  a  little  older  than  Sir  Charles  Dilke.  His  birthplace 
was  a  hamlet  close  to  the  old  and  picturesque  town  of 
Fontenay-le-Comte,  in  the  Vendc^^e,  where  his  father 
practised  as  a  doctor.  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  Ben- 
jamin Clemenceau,  an  old  provincial  "bleu,"  materialist 
and  Jacobin,  exercised  a  great  influence  on  the  mind  of 
his  son,  who  accepted,  with  a  docility  remarkable  in  so 
firm  an  individual,  the  traditions  of  his  race  and  family. 
We  are  told  that  the  elder  Clemenceau  "communicated  to 
his  son  his  hatred  of  injustice,  his  independence,  his 
scientific  worship  of  facts,  his  refusal  to  bow  to  anything 
less  than  the  verdict  of  experiment."  There  was  also  a 
professional  tradition  to  which  young  Georges  Clemen- 
ceau assented.  For  three  hundred  years,  without  a  break, 
his  forebears  had  been  doctors.  I  do  not  think  that  any 
of  his  biographers  has  observed  the  fact  that  Fontenay-le- 
Comte,  though  so  small  a  place,  has  always  been  a  centre 
of  advanced  scientific  thought.  It  has  produced  a  line  of 
eminent  physicians,  for  Pierre  Brissot  was  born  there  in 
the  fifteenth  century,  Sebastian  Collin  in  the  sixteenth, 
and  Mathurin  Brisson  in  the  eighteenth.  There  can  be 
little  doubt  that  these  facts  were  in  the  memory  of  the 
elder  Clemenceau  and  were  transmitted  to  his  son. 

Fontenay-le-Comte  is  on  the  western  edge  of  the 
Bocage  of  Poitou,  not  to  be  confounded  with  the  delicious 
woodland  Bocage  which  lies  south  and  west  of  Caen.  The 
Poitou  Bocage  is  a  more  limited  and  a  more  remote  dis- 
trict, little  visited  by  tourists,  a  rolling  country  of  heather- 
land  clustered  with  trees,  and  split  up  by  little  torrential 
chasms.  It  is  often  to  be  recognized  in  M.  Clemenceau's 
sketches  of  landscapes,  and  is  manifestly  the  scene  of  part 
of  his  novel.  Les  Phis  Forts.  The  natural  capital  of  this 
Bocage  is  Nantes,  lying  full  to  the  north  of  Fontenay, 
and  ihither  the  young  man  went  at  an  early  age  to  study 
at  the  Lycee,  It  was  at  the  hospital  at  Nantes  that  his 
first    introduction    to    medicine    was    made.     Thence    he 

226 


The  Writings  of  M.  Clemenceau 

finally  departed  in  i860,  another  deracine,  to  fight  for  his 
fortunes  in  Paris.  He  brought  little  with  him  save  a  letter 
of  introduction  from  his  father  to  Etienne  Arago.  For 
five  years  he  worked  indomitably  at  his  medical  studies, 
refreshing  his  brain  occasionally  by  brief  holidays  spent 
at  his  father's  rough  and  ancient  manor-house  of  Aubraic, 
in  his  native  Bocage. 

He  took  his  degree  of  M.D.  in  1865,  and  presented  a 
thesis  De  la  Generation  des  Elements  anatomiques,  which 
was  immediately  published,  and  which  caused  some  stir  in 
professional  circles.  It  is  said  to  contain  a  vigorous 
refutation  of  some  of  the  doctrines  of  Auguste  Comte,  and 
in  particular  to  deprecate  a  growing  agnosticism  among 
men  of  science.  The  axiom,  "Supprimer  les  questions, 
n'est  pas  y  repondre,"  is  quoted  from  it,  and  again  the 
characteristic  statement,  "Nous  ne  sommes  pas  de  ceux 
qui  admettent  avec  I'ecole  positiviste  que  la  science  ne 
peut  fournir  aucun  renseignement  sur  I'enigme  des  choses." 
The  thesis  dealt,  moreover,  according  to  M.  Pierre 
Quillard,  who  has  had  the  courage  to  unearth  and  to 
analyse  it,  with  "lesorganismesrudimentairesdesnepheles, 
des  hirudinees  et  glossiphonies,"  subjects  the  very 
names  of  which  are  horrifying  to  the  indolent  lay  reader. 
The  young  savant,  shaking  off  the  burden  of  his  studies, 
escaped  to  London,  where  he  appears  to  have  made  the 
acquaintance,  through  Admiral  Maxse,  of  several  English- 
men who  were  about  to  become  famous  in  the  world  of 
politics  and  letters.  But  perhaps  these  friendships  are  of 
later  date ;  as  the  memoirs  of  the  mid-Victorians  come  more 
and  more  to  light,  the  name  of  M.  Clemenceau  will  be 
looked  for  in  the  record. 

He  went  to  the  United  States  in  1866,  and  took  an 
engagement  as  French  master  in  a  girls'  school  at  Stam- 
ford, in  Connecticut,  a  seaside  haunt  of  tired  New  Yorkers 
in  summer.  A  little  later,  Verlaine  was  under-master  in  a 
boys'  school  at  Bournemouth.  How  little  we  guess,  when 
we  take  our  walks  abroad,  that  genius,  and  foreign  genius 
too,  may  be  lurking  in  the  educational  procession  ! 
M.  Clemenceau  appears  to  look  back  on  Stamford  with 

227 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

complacency;  he  accompanied  "dans  leurs  promenades  les 
jeunes  misses  am6ricaines  :  c'etaient  de  libres  et  d^licieuses 
chevauch^es,  des  excursions  charmantes  au  long  des  routes 
ombreuses  qui  sillonnent  les  riants  parages "  of  Long 
Island  Sound.  He  declares  that  the  happy  and  light- 
hearted  years  at  Stamford  were  those  in  which  his  tem- 
perament "acheva  dc  se  fortifier  et  de  s'affiner."  It  was 
in  the  course  of  one  of  the  "suaves  equipees  "  that  he 
ventured  to  propose  to  one  of  the  young  American 
"misses."  This  was  Miss  Mary  Plummer,  whom  he 
married  after  a  preliminary  visit  to  France. 

For  the  next  quarter  of  a  century  Clemenceau  was 
exclusively  occupied  with  politics.  In  1870  he  was  settled 
in  Montmartre,  in  a  circle  of  workmen  and  little 
employes  whose  bodily  maladies  he  relieved,  and  whose 
souls  he  inflamed  with  his  ardent  dreams  of  a  humanitarian 
paradise  when  once  the  hated  Empire  should  fall.  Sud- 
denly the  war  broke  out,  and  the  Empire  was  shattered. 
The  government  of  defence  nominated  Dr.  Clemenceau 
Mayor  of  Montmartre,  the  most  violent  centre  of  revolu- 
tionary emotion,  where  the  excesses  of  the  Commune 
presently  began.  He  represented  Montmartre  at  Bor- 
deaux in  1 87 1,  and  in  1876  Montmartre,  which  had 
remained  faithful  to  its  doctor-mayor,  sent  him  again  to 
the  Chamber  of  Deputies  as  its  representative.  This  is 
not  the  occasion  on  which  to  enter  into  any  detail  with 
regard  to  the  ceaseless  activity  which  he  displayed  in  a 
purely  political  capacity  between  1870  and  1893.  It  is 
enshrined  in  the  history  of  the  Republic,  and  will  occupy 
the  pens  of  innumerable  commentators  of  French  aflfairs. 
We  can  only  record  that  in  1889,  M.  Clemenceau,  who  had 
refused  many  pressing  invitations  to  leave  Paris  for 
Draguignan,  consented  to  take  up  his  election  as  deputy 
for  the  Provencal  department. 

The  career  of  M.  Clemenceau  as  deputy  for  the  Var 
came  to  an  end  in  1893,  after  the  explosion  of  the  Panama 
scandal.  On  the  8th  of  August  in  thgit  year  he  pronounced 
an  apologia  over  his  political  life,  an  address  full  of 
dignity  and  fire,  in  which  the  failure  of  his  ambition  was 

228 


The  Writings  of  M.  Clemenceau 

acknowledged.  His  figure  was  never  more  attractive  than 
it  was  at  that  distressing  moment,  when  he  found  himself 
the  object  of  almost  universal  public  disfavour.  He  had, 
perhaps,  over-estimated  the  vigour  of  his  own  prestige;  he 
had  browbeaten  the  political  leaders  of  the  day,  he  had 
stormed  like  a  bull  the  china-shops  of  the  little  political 
hucksters,  he  had  contemptuously  exposed  the  intrigues  of 
the  baser  sort  of  political  politician.  He  disdained  popu- 
larity so  proudly,  that  one  of  his  own  supporters  urged 
him  to  cultivate  the  hatred  of  the  crowd  with  a  little  less 
coquettishness.  But  he  was  a  political  Don  Quixote,  not 
to  be  held  nor  bound;  he  could  but  rush  straight  upon  his 
own  temporary  discomfiture. 

The  means  which  his  enemies  employed  to  displace  him 
were  contemptible  in  the  extreme,  but  their  malice  was 
easily  accounted  for.  He  had  excited  the  deep  resentment 
of  all  the  supporters  of  General  Boulanger,  who  accused 
him  of  being  the  cause  of  their  favourite's  fall,  and  with 
having  betrayed  him  in  1888.  The  fanatics  of  the  Panama 
scandal  endeavoured  to  prove  that  his  newspaper.  La 
Justice,  had  supported  the  schemes  and  accepted  the 
cheques  of  the  egregious  Cornelius  Herz.  The  Anglo- 
phobes,  who  unhappily  numbered  too  many  of  the  less 
thinking  population  of  France  at  that  time,  accused  him  of 
/intriguing  with  the  English  Government  to  the  detriment 
of  the  Republic,  and  they  went  so  far  as  to  produce  docu- 
ments, forged  by  the  notorious  mulatto,  Norton,  which 
they  pretended  had  been  stolen  from  our  embassy  in  Paris. 
"Qu'il  parle  anglais,"  was  one  accusation  shouted  at 
Clemenceau  in  the  Chamber  on  the  4th  of  June,  1888. 
Calamities  of  every  sort,  public  and  private,  gathered 
V  round  his  undaunted  head.  At  last  he  could  ignore  these 
^  attacks  no  longer,  and  on  a  fateful  day  he  rose  to  put 
hLmself  right  before  Parliament.  It  was  too  late;  his 
appearance  was  greeted  by  an  icy  silence,  and,  as  he  said 
himself,  he  glanced  round  to  see  none  but  the  hungry  faces 
of  men  longing  for  the  moment  when  they  could  trample 
on  his  corpse.  Magnificent  as  was  his  defence,  it  availed 
him  nothing  against  such  a  combination  of  malignities; 
p  229 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

even  his  few  friends,  losing  courage,  failed  to  support  him. 
The  legislative  elections  were  at  hand,  and  the  enemies  of 
M.  Clemenceau  very  cleverly  organized  a  press  propa- 
ganda, which  presented  him  to  the  French  public  in  an 
absolutely  odious  light.  He  went  down  to  address  his 
Provencal  constituents,  and  in  the  little  mountain  town  of 
Salernes  he  delivered  the  remarkable  speech  to  which 
reference  has  been  made.  All  in  vain  :  on  the  20th  of 
August,  1893,  he  was  ignominiously  rejected  by  the  electors 
of  the  Var  in  favour  of  a  local  nonentity,  and  his  career 
as  a  member  of  parliament  ended. ^ 

These  circumstances,  which  paralysed  for  many  years 
the  parliamentary  activity  of  Clemenceau,  have  to  be 
borne  in  mind  when  we  examine  his  literary  record. 
Without  delay,  in  that  spirit  of  prompt  acceptance  of  the 
inevitable  which  has  never  ceased  to  mark  his  buoyant, 
elastic  character,  he  threw  himself  into  a  new  employment. 
He  became,  in  his  fifty-third  year,  one  of  the  most  active 
and  persistent  journalists  in  France.  His  fiery  indepen- 
dence and  his  audacious  vivacity  pointed  him  out  at  once 
to  editors  who  had  the  wit  to  cater  for  the  better,  that  is  to 
say  for  the  livelier,  class  of  readers.  M.  Clemenceau,  a 
free  lance  if  ever  there  was  one,  became  the  terror  and  the 
delight  of  Le  Figaro,  La  Justice,  and  Le  Journal,  while  to 
La  Depeche  de  Toulouse  he  contributed  articles  which  pre- 
supposed a  wider  horizon  and  depended  less  on  the  passion 
of  the  moment.  Future  bibliographers,  it  may  be,  will 
search  the  files  of  these  and  other  newspapers  of  that  day 
for  more  and  more  numerous  examples  of  his  fecundity, 
since  he  embraced  all  subjects  in  what  he  called  the  huge 

^  A  very  interesting  account  of  the  events  which  led  to  the  fall  of  M. 
Clemenceau  is  given  in  the  autobiography  of  the  late  Mr.  Hyndman,  who 
had  the  advantage  of  enjoying  M.  Clemenceau's  friendship  from  an  early 
date.  He  considers  that  the  French  statesman  might  have  faced  the  storm 
with  success  if  he  would  but  have  consented  to  make  terms  with  the 
Socialists.  But  he  would  not  do  so  :  he  replied  to  Mr.  Hyndman — "  It  is 
as  useless  to  base  any  practical  policy  upon  Socialist  principles  as  it  is 
chimerical  to  repose  any  confidence  in  Socialist  votes."  When  Mr. 
Hyndman  urged  that  this  attitude  of  hostility  to  all  parties  might  lose 
him  his  seat  in  the  Var,  Clemenceau  "  laughed  at  the  very  idea  of  such 
a.  defeat."  Nor  has  the  conflict  between  him  and  the  revolutionary 
Socialists  ever  ceased. 

230 


The  Writings  of  M.  Ciemenceau 

forest  of  social  existence.  An  exhibition  of  pictures,  a 
new  novel,  an  accident  in  the  suburbs,  a  definition  of  God 
by  M.  Jules  Simon,  a  joke  by  M.  Francis  Maynard,  the 
effect  of  champagne  upon  labour  unrest,  the  architecture  of 
Chicago — nothing  came  amiss  to  the  pen  of  a  man  whose 
curiosity  about  life  was  boundless,  and  whose  facility  in 
expression  was  volcanic. 

But  there  was  a  certain  group  of  subjects  whichj  at  this 
critical  hour  in  his  career,  particularly  attracted  the  atten- 
tion of  M.  Ciemenceau,  and  these  give  a  special  colour  to 
the  earliest,  and  perhaps  the  most  remarkable,  collection 
of  his  essays.  A  student  of  the  temperament  of  the  great 
statesman,  as  he  has  since  then  so  pre-eminently  shown 
himself  to  be,  is  bound  to  give  his  mind  to  the  volume 
called  La  Melee  Sociale  which  M.  Ciemenceau  published 
in  1895.  This  was  practically  his  earliest  bid  for  purely 
literary  distinction,  since  the  juvenile  theses  on  anatomical 
subjects,  and  the  translations  from  John  Stuart  Mill, 
hardly  come  within  the  category  of  literature.  Between 
1876  and  1885  M.  Ciemenceau  had  printed,  or  had  per- 
mitted to  be  circulated,  a  certain  number  of  his  speeches  in 
the  Chamber ;  I  have  traced  eight  of  these  in  the  catalogue 
of  M.  Le  Blond.  These  formed  a  very  small  fraction  of 
his  abundant  eloquence  in  Parliament,  and  they  were  not 
particularly  finished  as  specimens  of  lettered  oratory.  But 
between  1885  and  1895  we  do  not  find  even  such  slender 
evidences  as  these  of  the  politician's  desire  to  pose  as  an 
author.  The  publication  of  La  Melee  Sociale,  therefore, 
was,  to  speak  practically,  an  experiment ;  it  was  the  chal- 
lenge of  a  new  writer,  or  at  least  of  a  publicist  w^ho  had 
never  before  competed  with  the  recognized  creators  of 
books. 

It  is  obvious  that  in  making  this  experiment  M. 
Ciemenceau  exercised  a  great  deal  of  care  and  forethought. 
The  articles  reprinted  are  not  presented  haphazard,  nor 
without  an  evident  intention  of  producing  the  best  effect 
possible.  They  are  selected  on  a  peculiar  system  from 
the  mass  of  the  journalist's  miscellaneous  output.  The 
collection  has  a  central  idea,  and  this  is  developed  in  a 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

very  rem«irkable  preface,  which  remains  one  of  the  author's 
most  philosophical  and  most  elaborate  compositions. 
This  central  idea  is  the  tragical  one  of  the  great  vital 
conflict  which  pervades  the  world,  has  always  pervaded 
it,  and  must  ever  remain  unaffected  by  the  superficial  im- 
provements of  civilization.  All  through  the  universe  the 
various  living  organisms  are  in  a  condition  of  ceaseless 
contest.  Everywhere  something  concjuers  something  else 
which  is  conquered,  and  life  sustains  itself  and  ensures  its 
own  permanence  by  spreading  death  around  it.  Life,  in 
fact,  depends  on  death  for  its  sustaining  energy,  and 
the  fiercer  the  passion  of  vitality  the  more  vehemently 
flourishes  the  instinct  of  destruction. 

The  imagination  of  the  author  of  La  Melee  Sociale 
broods  upon  the  monstrous  facts  of  natural  liistory.  If 
he  traverses  a  woodland,  he  is  conscious  of  a  silent  army 
of  beasts  and  birds  and  insects,  and  even  of  trees  and 
plants,  which  are  waging  ceaseless  battle  against  others 
of  their  kind.  If  he  begins  to  stir  the  soil  of  a  meadow 
with  his  foot,  he  refrains  with  a  shudder,  since  millions 
of  corpses  lie  but  just  below  the  surface  of  the  fruitful 
earth.  He  peers  down  into  the  depths  of  the  sea,  only 
to  recognize  that  a  prodigious  and  unflagging  massacre 
of  living  forms  is  necessary  to  keep  the  ocean  habitable  for 
those  who  survive.  Everywhere,  throughout  the  universe, 
he  finds  carnage  triumphant ;  and  eternal  warfare  is  the 
symbol  of  the  instinct  of  self-preservation. 

It  will  be  seen  that  the  new  author  approached  fitera- 
ture  definitely  from  the  scientific  side,  but  also  that  he 
placed  himself  almost  exclusively  under  the  direction  of 
English  minds.  M.  Clemenceau,  in  that  intense  and 
unceasing  contemplation  of  life  which  has  been  his  most 
remarkable  characteristic,  has  ahvays  been  inspired  by 
English  models.  In  his  early  youtli  he  was  deeply  im- 
pressed with  the  teaching  of  J.  S.  Mill,  and  in  later  years 
he  was  manifestly  under  the  successive  sway  of  Sir  Charles 
Lyell  and  of  Herbert  Spencer.  But  by  the  time  he  col- 
lected his  essays  in  La  MeUe  Sociale,  he  was  completely 
infatuated  by  the  system  of  Darwin.     He  had  long  been 

232 


The  Writings  of  M.  Clemenceau 

familiar  with  The  Origin  of  Species  and  The  Descent  of 
Man;  the  death  of  Darwin  in  1882  had  deprived  him  of  a 
master  and,  as  it  seemed,  a  friend,  while  the  publication 
of  the  Life  and  Letters  in  1887  had  given  a  coherency  and, 
we  may  say,  an  atmosphere,  to  his  conception  of  the 
illustrious  English  savant.  When,  therefore,  M.  Clemen- 
ceau put  together  the  material  of  La  Melee  Sociale,  he 
did  so  in  the  quality  of  an  advanced  Darwinian,  and  he 
produced  his  first  book  almost  as  a  tribute  of  affection  to 
the  memory  of  the  greatest  exponent  of  the  tragedy  of 
natural  selection.  But  the  habit  of  his  mind,  and  no  doubt 
the  conditions  of  his  own  fortunes,  led  him  into  a  field 
more  tragical  than  any  haunted  by  the  spirit  of  the  placid 
philosopher  of  Down.  Charles  Darwin  refrained  from 
pushing  his  observations  to  such  sinister  conclusions  as 
this: 

La  mort,  partout  la  mort.  Les  continents  et  leS  mers 
gfdmissent  de  I'effroyable  offrande  de  massacre.  C'est  le  cirque, 
I'immense  Collysde  de  la  Terre,  oil  tout  ce  qui  ne  pouvait  vivre 
que  de  mort,  se  pare  de  lumi^re  et  de  vie  pour  mourir.  De 
I'herbe  k  I'elephant,  pas  d 'autre  loi  que  la  loi  du  plus  fort. 
Au  nom  de  la  meme  loi,  le  dernier  n6  de  revolution  vivante 
confond  tout  ce  qui  est  de  vie  dans  une  prodig-ieuse  h^catombe 
offerte  h  la  suprematie  de  sa  race.  Point  de  phi6.  Le  pouce 
retournd  commande  la  mort.  L'ame  ingrate  r^pudie  I'antique 
solidarity  des  6tres  enlaces  en  la  chaine  des  generations  trans- 
form^es.  Le  coeur  dur  est  ferm6.  Tout  ce  qui  echappe  au 
carnage  pr^medite,  voulu,  s'entretue  pour  la  gloire  du  grand 
barbare.  La  splendeur  de  la  floraison  de  vie  s'eteint  dans  le 
sangf,  pour  en  renaitre,  pour  y  sombrer  encore.  Et  le  cirque, 
toujours  vidd,  s'emplit  toujours. 

This  passage  may  be  taken  as  characteristic  of  the 
manner  of  M.  Clemenceau  in  his  most  reflective  mood,  in 
the  "style  bref,  mais  clair  et  vibrant,"  which  Octave 
Mirbeau  commended.  This  way  of  writing  would  err  on 
the  side  of  rhetoric,  were  it  not  so  concise  and  rapid,  so 
full  of  the  gusto  of  life  even  in  its  celebration  of  death. 
For,  in  the  pages  of  La  Melee  Sociale,  M.  Clemenceau 

233 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

shows  himself  interpenetrated  by  the  sorrows  rather  than 
sustained  by  the  possibilities  of  the  tormented  inhabitants 
of   eartli.       Recent   events,    in   his  own    life   and    in    the 
history  of  the  French  nation,  had  impressed  on  his  con- 
sciousness the  inherent  cruelty  of  human  beinj:;s  to  one 
anotlier.     Like  Wordsworth,  and  with  a  far  sharper  per- 
sonal pang,  he  had  good  reason  to  lament  what  man  has 
made  of  man.     Moreover,  the  months  which  had  extended 
between    j\I.    Clemenceau's  political    fall    and    the   publi- 
cation of  La  Melee  Sociale  had  been  marked  by  violent 
unrest  and  by  a  succession  of  political  crimes.    Anarchism, 
hitherto  more  a  theory  and  a  threat  than  a  practical  ele- 
ment in  the  existence  of  the  people,  had  taken  startling 
prominence.       In   quick   and   formidable    succession    the 
crimes  of  Vaillant,  of  Emile  Henry,  of  Caserio  and  others, 
had  filled  the  minds  of  men  with  alarm  and  horror.     These 
events,    and    the    strikes    in    various   trades    with    their 
attendant  sabotage,  and  the  unrest  among  the  miners,  and 
the  earliest  germination  of  that  new  disease  of  the  State, 
syndicalism, — all  these  and  many  other  evidences  of  re- 
newed bitterness  in  the  struggle  for  life  created  in  the 
mind  of  M.  Clemenceau  an  obsession  which  is  reflected 
in  every  chapter  of  La  Melee  Sociale.     As  a  physician, 
no  less  than   as  a  publicist,   he  diagnosed  the   "mis^re 
physiologique "  of  the  age,   and  he  railed  against  those 
in  power  who  touched  with  the  tips  of  their  white  kid 
gloves  the  maladies  which  were  blackening  the  surface 
and  substance  of  human  society.     In  the  memory  of  the 
attempt  made  last  February  to  assassinate  M.  Clemenceau, 
a  special  interest  attaches  to  his  discussion  of  this  class 
of  murders,  of  which  he  gave  a  remarkably  close  and  pro- 
longed analysis,  little  conceiving,  of  course,  that  he  would 
live  to  be  himself  the  object  of  a  crime  at  which  the  whole 
world  would  shudder. 

The  reader  who  wishes  the  literary  aspect  of  M. 
Clemenceau's  mind  to  be  revealed  to  him  in  its  greatest 
amenity  may  next  be  recommended  to  turn  to  the  preface 
of  the  volume  entitled  Le  Grand  Pan,  which  appeared  in 
1896.     The  book  itself  consists  of  seventy  little  essays, 

234 


The  Writings  of  M.  Clemenceau 

reprinted  from  the  Figaro,  the  Echo  de  Paris,  and  other 
newspapers.  These  have  nothing  or  very  little  to  do  with 
Pan,  but  they  are  eked  out  and  given  determination  by  a 
long  rhapsody  in  honour  of  the  goat-foot  son  of  Callista, 
treated  as  the  symbol  of  natural,  as  opposed  to  super- 
natural science.  Everybody  knows  the  famous  passage 
in  Plutarch  w^hich  describes  how  Thamous  the  pilot,  sail- 
ing out  of  the  Gulf  of  Corinth  towards  the  Ionian  Sea  on 
the  eve  of  the  crucifixion  of  Christ,  heard  a  voice  announce 
that  "Great  Pan  is  dead!" 

And  that  dismal  cry  rose  slowly 
And  sank  slowly  through  the  air, 
Full  of  spirit's  melancholy 
And  eternity's  despair! 
And  they  heard  the  words  it  said — 
Pan  is  dead — Great  Pan  is  dead — 
Pan,  Pan  is  dead. 

In  a  passage  of  rare  picturesque  beauty  M.  Clemenceau 
reproduces  the  animated  and  mysterious  scene.  He  had 
himself  lately  returned  from  a  visit  to  Greece,  which  had 
deeply  stirred  the  sources  of  his  sensibility.  He  recalled 
how  the  sun,  in  a  transparency  of  pale  gold,  sank  behind 
the  blue  mass  of  Ithaca,  tinged  with  rose-colour  the  crags 
of  the  Echinades,  and  bathed  the  mountains  and  the  sea 
in  the  delicate  enchantment  of  sunset.  He  was  sensitive 
to  the  paroxysm  of  pleasure  such  an  experience  produces, 
and  he  conceived  himself  standing  by  the  side  of  the 
grammarian,  Epitherses,  on  board  the  merchant-vessel, 
at  the  very  moment  when  there  sounded  three  times  from 
the  shore  the  name  of  Thamous,  the  Egyptian  pilot,  who 
answered  at  length,  and  received  the  mysterious  command, 
"When  thou  art  opposite  Palodes,  announce  that  the  great 
Pan  is  dead  !  "  The  recesses  of  the  mountains,  the  caves 
on  the  island,  the  solitude  of  the  drear  battle-field  of 
Actium,  took  up  the  hollow  cry  and  reverberated  it  in  a 
thousand  accents  of  despair,  with  groans  and  shrieks  of 
sorrow  and  confused  bewailing,  while  all   nature  united 

235 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

in  the  echoiiifj  lamentation,  "Pan,  great  Pan,  is 
dead  !  " 

In  this  slran<,^e  way  M.  Clemenceau  opens  an  essay  in 
defence  of  a  purely  positivist  theory  of  human  existence. 
He  describes  the  doctrine  of  the  pagan  divinities,  under 
the  tyranny  of  Christianity,  and  he  predicts  their  resur- 
rection under  clearer  and  calmer  auspices.  For  M. 
Clemenceau,  Pan  is  the  symbol  of  life  in  its  harmonious 
and  composite  action,  and  science  is  the  intelligent  worship 
of  Pan.  This  despised  and  fallen  god,  who  seemed  for 
one  dark  moment  to  be  dead,  survives  and  will  return  to 
his  faithful  adorers,  has  indeed  returned  already,  and 
turns  the  tables  on  his  priestly  persecutors.  The  apparent 
death  of  Pan  was  but  a  sleep  and  a  forgetting ;  the  spirit 
of  humanity,  dominated  for  a  moment  by  superstition  and 
ignorance,  seemed  to  be  lying  bound  and  mute,  but  it  is 
vocal  again,  and  its  powers  prove  to  be  unshackled.  The 
Orphic  hymn,  in  dark  numbers,  had  pronounced  the  sky 
and  the  sea,  earth  the  universal  and  fire  the  immortal,  to 
be  the  limbs  of  Pan.  Under  the  early  sway  of  Christianity 
the  office  and  meaning  of  the  pagan  gods  faded  into  mist ; 
they  seemed  to  disappear  for  ever.  Darkness  gathered 
over  the  sweet  natural  influences  of  the  physical  world, 
and  reality  was  bartered  for  a  feverish  dream  of  heaven 
and  hell. 

But  the  gods  were  only  preparing  in  silence  for  their 
ultimate  resuscitation.  Lactantius  said  that  "Idols  and 
religion  are  two  incompatible  things  " ;  in  his  famous  De 
Origine  Erroris,  conscious  of  the  necessity  of  recognizing 
a  central  force  of  energy  in  nature,  the  earliest  Christian 
philosopher  repulsed  the  notion  of  polytheism,  and  in- 
sisted that  piety  can  exist  only  in  the  worship  of  the  one 
God.  He,  like  the  Christian  Fathers  before  him,  shut  up 
the  spirit  of  man  in  a  prison  from  which  there 
seemed  no  escape.  But  the  polytheists,  thus  violently 
Christianized  against  their  will,  remained  pagan  in 
essence,  and  they  escaped,  as  by  a  miracle,  from  the 
furies  of  the  Gospel  and  the  Koran.  The  revolt  was  held 
in  check  through  the  Middle  Ages;  in  the  Renaissance  it 

236 


The  Writings  of  M.  Clemenceau 

became  victorious,  and  the  first  activity  of  man  in  liberty 
was  an  unconscious  but  none  the  less  real  restitution  of 
the  old  liberating-  deities.  The  shepherds  of  Arcadia  saw 
the  blood  come  back  into  the  marble  face  and  hands  of 
their  dead  god.  Pan  was  moving  on  the  earth  once  more, 
for  he  had  triumphed  over  the  sterile  forces  of  dissolution. 
Pan,  as  ancient  as  social  order  itself,  radiant  master  of 
the  beneficent  powers  of  light,  has  once  more  become  the 
supreme  deity.  This,  put  briefly,  is  the  thesis  of  M. 
Clemenceau. 

The  influence  of  Renan  is  manifest  through  the  whole 
of  this  rhapsody,  which  is  unique  among  the  writings  of 
its  author.  M.  Clemenceau  had  followed  the  track  of 
Pan  through  the  valleys  of  Arcadia,  and  up  the  rocky 
pathways  that  rise  abruptly  from  the  stony  bed  of  Alpheus. 
An  actual  visit  to  Greece,  the  date  of  which  I  have  not 
verified,  appears  to  have  influenced  his  imagination;  he 
says,  "je  I'ai  voulu  chercher,  moi-meme ;  au  depit  de 
Thamous,  pres  des  antiques  sources  dolentes,"  and  he 
tells  us  how  an  avalanche  of  falling  stones  and  a  clatter 
of  cloven  hoofs  overhead  often  made  him  fancy  the  deity 
almost  within  his  grasp.  In  these  passages  M.  Clemen- 
ceau reveals  himself  more  plainly  than  anywhere  else  as 
an  imaginative  positivist,  who  permits  his  fancy  to  play 
with  romantic  and  even  fantastic  visions,  yet  who  is  none 
the  less  essentially  emancipated  from  everything  but 
reality.  He  is  never  the  dupe  of  his  own  symbol.  He 
rejects  natural  religion  no  less  firmly  than  revealed  re- 
ligion, and  he  will  not  submit  his  conscience  to  any 
supernatural  authority.  The  reader,  if  he  has  the  patience 
to  do  so,  may  follow  the  close  parallelism  of  the  purely 
intellectual  positivism  of  the  author  with  the  charming, 
supple,  elusive  philosophy  of  Renan  in  his  L'Avenir  de 
la  Science, 

In  no  other  of  his  writings  is  M.  Clemenceau  quite  so 
emancipated  from  the  prejudice  of  the  moment  as  he  is 
in  the  preface  to  Le  Grand  Pan.  His  central  idea  is  one 
of  satisfaction  in  the  survival  of  the  spirits  of  the  dead 
gods,  to  whom,  of  course,  he  gives  his  own  formula  of 

237 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

definition.  Nothing  in  history  seems  to  affect  him  more 
painfully  than  the  tragedy  of  the  massacre  of  the  sacred 
statues  under  Theodosius,  when,  as  Gibbon  has  so  elo- 
quently described,  the  most  high  gods  were  exposed  to 
the  derision  of  the  crowd,  and  then  melted  down.  Where 
M.  Clemenceau's  emotion  seems  to  be  slightly  deficient 
in  logic  is  the  parallel  between  these  ancient  gods  who 
retain  his  sympathy,  and  the  strictly  impersonal  forces  of 
which  he  acknowledges  them  a  symbol.  He  delights  in 
Apollo,  Pan,  and  Jove,  and  speaks  of  them  almost  as 
though  they  w^ere  individuals,  yet  he  admits  no  senti- 
mentality with  regard  to  what  they  represent.  On  the 
whole,  his  attitude  is  not  one  of  benignity.  He  confesses 
that  nature  reveals  nothing  but  a  system  of  forces  inter- 
acting upon  one  another;  it  is  not  moral  and  it  is  not 
beneficent.  Here  the  tone  of  Le  Grand  Pan  becomes 
identical  w^ith  that  of  La  Melee  So  dale.  But  we  demand 
a  clear  definition  of  the  central  symbol.  What  does  M. 
Clemenceau  really  mean  us  to  understand  by  Pan  ?  We 
push  him  up  into  a  corner;  we  refuse  to  let  him  take 
refuge  in  his  Renanesque  imaginations,  and  we  extract 
an  answer  at  last.  Pan  is  the  source  of  all  moral  and 
intellectual  action  : 

Pan  nous  commande.  II  faut  agir.  L'action  est  le 
principe,  Taction  est  le  moyen,  Taction  est  le  but.  L'action 
obstin^e  de  tout  Thomme  au  profit  de  tous,  Taction  desin- 
t6ress6e,  sup^rieure  aux  pueriles  glorioles,  aux  remunerations 
des  reves  d'^ternite,  comme  aux  desesperances  des  batailles 
perdues  ou  de  Tineluctable  mort,  Taction  en  Evolution  d'iddal, 
unique  force  et  totale  vertu. 

The  career  of  M.  Clemenceau  has  been  marked 
throughout  by  sudden  and  spasmodic  crises,  rather  than 
by  slow  evolution  of  events.  If  this  is  true  of  his  political 
history,  it  is  repeated  in  his  literary  record.  We  need 
not,  therefore,  affect  surprise  at  finding  him,  at  the  age 
of  fifty-seven,  and  in  the  midst  of  the  most  bewildering 
distractions,  produce  his  one  and  only  novel,  a  modern 

238 


The  Writings  of  M.  Clemenceau 

story  deliberately  conducted  to  its  close  in  four  hundred 
pages.  When  Les  Plus  Forts  \vas  published,  in  1898,  its 
author  was  extremely  out  of  the  fashion,  and  it  passed 
almost  unobserved  from  the  press.  Not  a  sin^^le  Parisian 
critic,  so  far  as  I  have  discovered,  gave  it  any  serious 
attention,  and  it  sank  at  once  into  an  obscurity  out  of 
which  the  immense  recent  vogue  of  M.  Clemenceau  has 
only  lately  drawn  it.  Les  Plus  Forts  was  issued  at  the 
darkest  moment  of  the  statesman's  reversal,  when  he  was 
repudiated  by  the  great  majority  of  those  who  adore  him 
to-day.  He  had  actually  gone  so  far  as  to  speak  of  his 
own  as  a  "vie  manquee,"  w^hen  a  fresh  opportunity  of 
perilous  service  to  the  State  fell  in  his  way. 

In  October,  1897,  M-  Ernest  Vaughan,  who  had  laid 
by  a  very  considerable  sum  of  money  for  the  purpose  of 
founding  an  efficient  social  and  literary  newspaper,  ap- 
proached Clemenceau  with  the  offer  of  the  editorship  in 
chief.  The  famous  L'Aurore  came  into  existence,  and  it 
set  sail  at  once  in  the  stormy  waters  of  the  Dreyfus  affair. 
Terrific  was  the  clash  of  passions  around  the  name  of  the 
mysterious  Jew,  whose  exact  character  and  definite  pur- 
pose will  perhaps  never  be  completely  elucidated.  M. 
Clemenceau  did  not  hesitate  to  throw  the  weight  of  his 
pen  into  the  unpopular  scale.  When  Esterhazy  was 
acquitted  he  almost  lost  his  self-control ;  with  furious  irony 
and  snarling  invectives  he  lashed  the  populace  into  a 
frenzy.  Then  followed  (on  the  13th  of  January,  1898) 
the  famous  intervention  of  Zola,  in  a  manifesto  which  rang 
from  one  end  of  the  civilized  world  to  the  other.  This 
was  J'accuse,  the  admirably  effective  title  of  which,  so 
M.  Maurice  Le  Blond  assures  us,  was  the  invention  of 
Clemenceau.  Next  month,  at  the  Zola  trial,  Clemenceau 
defended  the  cause  of  justice  in  the  teeth  of  enemies  who 
did  not  refrain  from  threatening  his  very  life,  and  for 
two  years  L'Aurore,  in  the  midst  of  the  frenzied 
Dreyfus  hurly-burly,  was  unflagging  in  its  attacks  and 
its  rejoinders. 

At  such  a  moment  M.  Clemenceau  sat  down  to  write 
his  solitary  novel.     It  would  be  fulsome  to  represent  Les 

239 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

Plus  Forls  as  a  masterpiece  of  fiction,  thougli  in  the 
present  flush  of  tlie  author's  celebrity  some  have  dared  so 
to  describe  it.  As  a  matter  of  fact  it  owes  the  interest 
which  it  possesses  almost  entirely  to  the  light  which  it 
throws  on  the  character  of  its  author.  As  a  mere  romance, 
Les  Phis  Furls  suffers  from  the  fact  that  its  author,  gifted 
in  so  many  other  directions,  is  not  an  effective  narrator. 
As  Dr.  Johnson  mischievously  said  of  Congreve's  one 
novel,  Incognita,  it  is  easier  to  praise  Les  Plus  Forts  than 
to  read  it.  The  scene  is  laid  in  a  village  deep  in  the  heart 
of  Poitou,  and  commentators  have  recognized  a  close 
reproduction  of  Mouilleron-en-Paradis,  the  hamlet  near 
Fontenay  where  M.  Clemenceau  was  born.  At  the 
moment  of  his  fiercest  struggle  in  Paris,  his  thoughts 
turned  back  to  the  cool  woods  and  the  still  waters  of  his 
old  home  in  the  west,  to  the  land  of  hollow  valleys,  and 
to  the  inexpressive  sixteenth-century  chateau  which  the 
doctor's  child  learned  to  regard  as  the  symbol  of  rapine 
and  tyranny  in  the  past. 

We  are  introduced  to  M.  Henri,  marquis  de  Puymau- 
fray,  a  man  of  over  sixty,  solitary,  a  confirmed  bachelor, 
not  so  good  a  shot  as  he  used  to  be.  The  lonely  old  man 
comes  back,  defeated  by  life,  to  his  chateau  in  Poitou. 
The  mise-en-sc^ne  is  lugubrious  in  the  extreme,  punctuated 
by  the  shrieking  peacocks  at  noon  and  the  hooting  owls 
at  night.  When  this  impression  has  been  sketched  in, 
we  turn  back  to  the  hero's  early  history,  and  follow  the 
adventures  of  a  young  buck  of  the  Second  Empire, 
brought  up  to  despise  science,  modern  thought,  the  action 
of  democracy  in  every  form.  He  begins  as  a  pontifical 
zouave  in  bondage  to  Rome;  he  ends  as  a  sort  of  anarchist. 
The  biography  of  the  young  and  stupid  nobleman  is  thus 
made  a  peg  on  which  to  hang  dissertations  on  all  the 
principal  maladies  which  affected  French  society  a  quarter 
of  a  century  ago.  There  is  an  exaggerated  forceful 
woman,  the  Vicomtesse  de  Fourchamps,  who  plays  a  sus- 
tained but  obscure  part  in  the  intrigue.  What  does  she 
want?  It  is  difficult  to  say;  she  is  always  "preparing  for 
the  battle"  or  attempting  to  "conquer"  somebody.     "II 

240 


The  Writings  of  M.  Clemenceau 

faut  conqu(5rir,"  she  incessantly  repeats;  she  is  a  kind  of 
tigress,  and  she  seems  to  be,  in  petticoats,  a  type  of  every 
social  and  political  movement  of  which  M.  Clemenceau 
disapproves. 

The  Parisian  scenes  in  J\I.  Clemenceau's  novel  are  not 
very  amusing,  and,  oddly  enough,  they  are  weighed  down 
by  a  sort  of  heavy  gorgeousness,  somewhat  in  the  mode 
of  Disraeli  not  at  his  best.  All  the  characters  preach, 
and  the  reader  comes  to  sympathize  with  the  vicomtesse 
when  she  declares  herself  "agacee  des  sermons  du  mar- 
quis." The  young  girl,  Claude  Harle,  is  a  somewhat 
shadowy  heroine.  She  passes  as  the  daughter  of  a  rich 
industrial,  but  she  is  in  reality  the  child  of  Puymaufray, 
who  was  the  lover  of  her  mother,  since  deceased.  It  is 
easy  to  understand  that  M.  Clemenceau  has  taken  this 
pathetic  and  tremulous  figure  as  representative  of  what  is 
chimerical  in  the  society  of  the  day.  In  her  original  con- 
dition, he  puts  into  her  mouth  the  crude  sentiments  which 
are  supposed  to  be  nurtured  by  the  enemies  of  democracy. 
Claude  calmly  states  that  "the  good  God  has  instituted 
two  classes  of  human  beings,  the  rich  and  the  poor,  and 
it  is  our  duty  to  maintain  our  inferiors  in  the  practices  of 
religion."  A  good  deal  of  art  is  required  to  remove  from 
such  speeches  as  these  the  crude  appearance  of  falsity ; 
and  it  may  be  remarked  that  the  pious  characters  in  Les 
Plus  Forts  are  not  more  like  real  human  beings  than  are 
the  atheists  in  M.  Paul  Bourget's  later  romances. 

What  is  of  extraordinary  interest  in  Les  Plus  Forts 
is  not  the  story  itself,  which  is  thin,  nor  the  conduct  of 
the  adventures,  which  is  stilted,  but  the  temper  and 
attitude  of  the  writer.  If  we  ask  ourselves  what  is  the 
principal  characteristic  of  this  novel,  the  answer  must  be 
— the  intensity  of  action  of  the  personages;  they  seem  to 
have  springs  of  steel  in  their  insides;  they  run  when  other 
people  walk,  and  cannot  move  without  leaping  in  the  air. 
"II  faut  aux  conquerants  la  pleine  s6curit6  de  leur  corps. 
Oij  I'ame  conduit,  la  bete  doit  suivre."  The  book  is  full 
of  strange  utterances  of  this  order,  which  reveal  the  vio- 
lence of  the  author's  temperament  in  flashes  of  odd  light. 

241 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

The  episodes,  the  conversations,  are  Httle  more  than  a 
series  of  irregular  theses  on  various  aspects  of  the  struggle 
for  life.  The  world  is  regarded  as  simply  "le  syndicat  des 
plus  forts,"  and  this  idea  underlies  the  title  of  the  book. 
We  are  not  allowed  to  forget  it,  even  when  our  atten- 
tion is  being  switched  away  to  the  discipline  of  little 
Chinese  children  in  a  missionary  settlement,  or  to  the 
importance  of  encouraging  a  manufacturer  of  paper  in 
Ceylon. 

What  is  perhaps  the  most  characteristic  passage  of  M. 
Clemenceau's  single  novel  may  be  quoted  as  an  example 
both  of  his  philosophy  and  of  his  style.  It  occurs  in 
the  course  of  a  long  conversation  between  father  and 
daughter. 

Certes  non,  I'argent  n'est  pas  tout.  II  est  trop,  simplement. 
L'argent  n'est  pas  tout,  mais  il  a  le  genre  humain  pour 
clientele,  car  il  est  devenu,  de  force  liWratrice,  I'egoisme 
tangible  en  rondelles  de  m6tal.  Voilk  pourquoi  tout  cfede  a 
I'universelle  attraction  qui  n'est  pas  suffisamment  contre- 
balanc6e  par  d'autres.  L'argent  n'est  pas  tout.  Pourtant 
autour  de  lui  se  rassemblent  toutes  les  autres  puissances 
sociales,  et  celles-lk  m^me  qui  s'annonc^rent  protectrices  des 
hommes,  aussitot  instances,  par  lui  se  sont  agglom^r^es  en 
tyrannie.  II  a  remplac^  la  force  brutale,  dit-on  ...  k  la  con- 
dition de  Texprimer  par  d' autres  signes.  Contre  I'expression 
du  monde,  il  y  avait  Dieu  autrefois,  a  dit  quelqu'un.  Peut-etre. 
J'ai  toujours  trouv^  Dieu  du  cote  des  plus  forts. 

M.  Clemenceau  did  not  pause,  meanwhile,  from  his 
journalistic  labours,  and  he  continued  to  offer  to  the  public 
of  Paris  successive  selections  from  the  mass  of  his  produc- 
tions. On  each  of  these  occasions  a  preface,  composed 
with  more  than  usual  care,  gave  the  keynote  to  the  series 
of  essays,  or  rather  suggested  a  tone  of  mind  in  which  the 
reader  would  do  well  to  study  them.  In  the  introduction 
to  the  volume  of  1900,  called  Att  Fil  des  Jours,  the  author 
returned  to  his  favourite  theme,  the  struggle  against  the 
universally  destructive  forces  of  Nature.  The  life  of  man 
is  concentrated  on  resistance  to  the  persistent  attacks  upon 

242 


The  Writings  of  M.  Clemenceau 

it  made  by  an  army  of  inimical  forces.  The  pride  of 
existence  is  humbled  by  the  inevitable  fatality  which 
governs  the  fortunes  of  the  Olympian  gods  themselves. 
And  it  is  useless  to  appeal,  with  the  sentimental  pantheists, 
to  the  beneficence  of  Nature,  for  Nature  is  the  most  relent- 
less, the  most  indomitable  of  our  enemies.  In  that  extra- 
ordinary little  tragedy  of  Victor  Hugo,  Mangeront-ils, 
the  vain  appeal  is  made  : 

Est-ce  pas, 
Nature,   que  tu  hais  les  semeurs  de  tr^pas. 
Qui  dans  I'air  frappent  I'aigle  et  sur  I'eau  la  sarcelle, 
Et  font  partout  saigner  la  vie  universelle? 

With  the  clairvoyance  of  the  biologist,  M.  Clemenceau 
divines  the  vanity  of  these  remonstrances,  and  from  the 
terrible  cruelty  of  Nature  he  sees  no  relief  save  in  vigorous 
action.  "Toute  ame  haute  veut  etre  de  la  melee."  The 
most  troublous  epochs  are  battles  for  the  ideal,  even  at  their 
worst  moments.  The  only  way  to  resist  the  destructive 
fatality  of  Nature  is  to  strive  for  an  amelioration  of  the  lot  of 
the  human  race.  In  all  this,  the  texture  of  which  is  occa- 
sionally a  little  stretched  when  it  is  made  to  cover  news- 
paper articles  on  the  lighting  of  Paris  or  a  show  of  prize 
pigeons,  M.  Clemenceau  displays  his  eager  wish  to  sub- 
ordinate all  his  writing  to  a  set  of  philosophical  ideas. 
He  has  alwaya.held  that  the  general  Impulses  on  which 
our  daily  existence  depends  reach  us  through  the  channels 
of  thought.  He  is,  therefore,  a  philosopher  by  determina- 
tion, and  he  bases  his  own  intellectual  system  on  Pasteur 
and  Spencer,  on  Darwin  and  J.  S.  Mill,  on  Taine  and 
Renan.  I  have  already  spoken  of  the  immense  influence 
evidently  exercised  on  Clemenceau  by  Renan's  early  and 
least  ripe  work  L'Avenir  de  la  Science.  No  doubt  it  was 
the  reading  of  that  remarkable  book  which  led  Clemenceau, 
already  biassed  in  favour  of  materialism,  to  transfer  to 
science  all  the  passion  which  an  earlier  generation,  and 
since  his  middle  age  a  later  generation,  gave  to  religion. 
It  must  be  understood  that  he  does  not  belong  in  habit  of 

243 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

mind  or  intellectual  aspiration  to  the  characteristic  French 
tradition  of  to-day. 

The  great  merit  of  M.  Clemenceau,  in  tlie  agitated 
years  when  he  wielded  a  pen  that  was  like  a  rapier,  con- 
sisted in  his  fearless  and  disdainful  audacity.  He  fought 
in  literature  exactly  as  he  has  always  fought  in  politics, 
with  the  air  of  one  who  had  no  wish  to  conciliate  his 
opponent,  but  always  to  browbeat  him,  to  crush  him  by  the 
weight  of  his  argument,  and  then  run  him  through  the 
body  with  his  irony.  When  we  turn  over  the  pages  of  his 
books,  which  suffer  an  inevitable  loss  from  the  fugitive 
nature  of  the  themes  on  which  they  mainly  expatiate,  we 
are  astounded  at  the  ceaseless  agility  of  the  lucid,  rest- 
less brain  of  the  man.  He  is  an  acrobat,  incessantly  fling- 
ing himself  with  aerial  lightness  into  some  new  impossible 
position.  An  article  a  day  for  twenty-five  years — what  an 
expenditure  of  vital  force  that  seems  to  sum  up ;  and  yet 
to-day,  at  the  age  of  seventy-eight,  the  indefatigable  brain 
and  body  seem  as  elastic  as  ever  !  The  fullness  of  the 
material  in  M.  Clemenceau 's  articles  has  always  been  a 
matter  of  amazement  to  those  who  know  how  much  clever 
journalism  is  of  the  kind  Francisque  Sarcey  described 
when  he  said,  "You  may  turn  the  tap  as  much  as  you 
please ;  if  the  cistern  is  empty,  nothing  but  wind  comes 
out!"  But  M.  Clemenceau  seemed  always  full,  and 
copious  as  was  the  output,  the  reader  had  always  the 
impression  that  there  was  much  more  behind. 

We  may  regret  that  while  the  great  politician  was 
chiefly  engaged  in  writing,  namely  between  1893  ^^d  1903, 
he  was  obliged  by  circumstances  to  expend  so  much  of  his 
experience  and  his  condition  upon  occasional  issues.  In 
turning  over  his  pages,  we  must  not  forget  that  he  wrote, 
not  in  the  calm  retirement  of  a  study,  but  out  in  the  street, 
in  the  midst  of  the  battle  and  heat  of  the  day.  His  in- 
satiable appetite  for  action  drove  him  forth  into  the 
madding  crowd.  There  has  always  been  something 
encvclop^edic  about  his  passion  for  knowledge,  for  prac- 
tical acquaintance  with  the  actual  practice  of  life.  He  has 
cultivated  a  genius  for  observation,  and  his  feverish  career 

244 


The  Writings  of  M.  Clemenceau 

has  been  spent  in  pursuing  knowledge  day  by  day,  without 
giving  himself  time  to  arrange  the  trophies  of  his  pursuit. 
He  has  published  no  systematic  scheme  of  his  philosophy, 
but  has  left  us  to  gather  it  as  well  as  we  may  from  his 
prefaces,  and  most  of  all  from  Le  Grand  Pan.  As  an 
author,  we  may  sum  him  up  as  the  latest,  and  in  some 
respects  the  most  vigorous  and  agile,  of  the  disciples  of  the 
Encyclopaedists.  Like  them,  through  a  long  and  breath- 
less career,  he  has  ceaselessly  striven  to  struggle  upward 
into  the  light  of  knowledge. 

1919. 


245 


A    VISIT    TO    THE    FRIENDS    OF    IBSEN 

IN  the  summer  of  1872  I  received  special  leave  from  the 
Principal  Librarian  of  the  British  Museum  to  visit 
Denmark  and  Norway  for  the  purpose  of  reporting  on 
the  state  of  current  literature  in  those  countries.  Of  my 
Danish  experiences  I  have  given  an  account  in  my  book 
called  Two  Visits  to  Denmark  (Smith,  Elder  &  Co.,  191 1); 
but  hitherto  I  have  not  published  any  of  my  Norwegian 
adventures.  I  am  led  to  do  so  now,  in  consequence  of  a 
letter  which  I  have  just  received  from  Rektor  Fredcrik 
Ording,  of  Holmestrand,  who  is  engaged  on  a  biographical 
study  of  "Henrik  Ibsen's  Ungdomsvenner,"  and  who  tells 
me  that  it  has  become  almost  impossible  to  obtain  informa- 
tion about  the  particular  group  of  men  of  letters  whom  I 
conversed  with  more  than  forty-five  years  ago.  They  are 
all  long  since  dead,  and  no  one  survives  who  recollects 
them  in  their  prime.  No  one — so  it  appears — but  me  ! 
The  fact  is  a  solemnizing  one.  I  feel  like  the  Moses  of 
the  poet  : 

Je  vivrai  done  toujours  puissant  et  solitaire? 
Laissez-moi  rn'ondormir  du  sommeil  de  la  tcrre ; 

but  before  I  am  allowed  by  Norway  to  do  that,  it  seems  that 
I  am  called  upon  to  disgorge  my  recollections.  They  are, 
I  am  afraid,  though  founded  on  a  full  journal,  rather 
slight. 

Ibsen,  as  is  well  known,  was  at  that  time,  and  had  long 
been,  an  exile  from  his  native  country,  where  his  plays 
were  ill  received  and  his  character  subjected  to  a  great  deal 
of  stupid  insult.  But  there  was  a  small  circle  of  his  early 
friends  who  remained  true  to  the  devotion  which  his  genius 
had  inspired  in  them.     When   I  was  in  Copenhagen,   it 

247 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

was  impressed  uj)on  me  that  these  men  formed  the  real 
Norway,  the  fine  flower  of  Norse  culture  and  intelHj^ence, 
and  it  was  to  them  that  I  Ux)k  introductions.  They  were 
mainly  jurists,  archaeologists  and  historians,  whose  studies 
into  the  annals  of  their  country  had  given  them  a  deter- 
mination to  support  existing  institutions.  They  were  called 
"Conservatives,"  and  by  the  radical  press  were  treated  as 
though  their  ideas  were  desperately  retrograde.  But  in 
any  other  country  but  Norway,  fifty  years  ago,  they  would 
have  been  called  advanced  Liberals.  They  desired  to  intro- 
duce broad  and  sweeping  reforms,  and  they  were  particu- 
larly desirous  to  follow  tiie  example  of  England.  If  I 
understand  their  position  aright,  they  were  rather  Con- 
stitutionalists than  Conservatives,  for  their  first  idea 
always  was  to  bring  their  views  into  line  with  the 
Constitution. 

A  short  time  before  my  visit,  the  barrier  which  sur- 
rounded and  isolated  the  group  of  men  of  whom  I  speak 
had  been  emphasized  by  the  development  of  the  Venstre, 
the  national  radical  party,  which  was  urged  on  and  sup- 
ported by  the  Peasants'  party.  The  debates  in  the  Storth- 
ing in  1871  and  1872  had  been  very  bitter,  and  public 
opinion  was  sharply,  but  unequally,  divided  over  the 
burning  question  of  the  admission  of  ministers  to  the 
national  assembly.  Without  going  further  into  the  ob- 
scurity of  foreign  politics,  it  is  enough  to  say  here  that  the 
group  into  which  I  was  for  a  short  time  admitted  as  an 
indulged  and  attentive  guest,  had  the  hope  that,  with  all 
its  talents  and  knowledge,  it  would  be  called  upon  to  take 
over  the  government  of  the  country.  It  was  thought  that 
Aschehoug  would  oust  the  radical  Sverdrup  as  the  next 
Prime  Minister.  The  reign  of  constitutionalism  would 
begin ;  the  peasant  leaders  would  be  sent  back  to  their 
farms;  and  Norway  would  open  a  splendid  period  of  con- 
servative re-action.  In  this,  the  friends  were  supported  by 
the  most  powerful  newspaper  of  the  country,  Morgen- 
bladet,  which  like  themselves  had  long  been  frankly  demo- 
cratic, but  had  recently  taken  a  very  strong  line  in 
opposition  to  the  Left.      Morgenbladet  was  boisterously 

248 


A  Visit  to  the  Friends  of  Ibsen 

attacked  b)^  Dagbladet,  the  rival  newspaper,  edited  by 
Samuel  Bc-etzmann,  a  bearded  and  very  tall  young  man, 
who  was  pointed  out  to  me  in  the  street,  with  execration  and 
contempt,  by  Jakob  Lokke. 

The  hope  of  my  friends  was  not  realized.  The  whole 
tendency  of  Norwegian  life  was  in  the  opposite  direction, 
and  a  few  days  after  I  left  Christiania,  the  death  of  King 
Carl  had  the  effect  of  still  further  encouraging  the  Liberals. 
The  group  I  had  known  were  swept  out  of  public  life  by  the 
tide  of  radicalism,  and  suffered  the  obscuration  which 
awaits  the  unsuccessful  politician.  Now,  as  it  appears, 
when  all  passion  has  died  down,  there  is  a  great  curiosity 
about  men  whose  talents  and  accomplishments,  as  well  as 
their  high  patriotism,  were  an  asset  in  the  civilization  of 
Norway  at  a  critical  moment.  Hence,  when  it  is  almost 
too  late,  and  when  I  am  left  the  only  survivor,  I  am 
appealed  to  for  my  recollections,  pale  and  slight  as  they 
must  be. 

Late,  then,  in  the  summer  of  1872  I  arrived  in  Chris- 
tiania, armed  with  cards  and  letters  of  introduction  from 
friends  in  Copenhagen,  and  with  a  recommendation  from 
Tennyson  to  Professor  Ludwig  Kristensen  Daa,  who  had 
been  very  civil  to  the  poet  when  he  visited  Norway.  I 
arrived  in  the  midst  of  the  excitement  caused  by  the  recent 
celebration  of  the  1,000  years'  festival,  and  in  particular 
we  crossed  Prince  Oskar  who  was  returning  to  Stockholm 
from  being  present  at  Haugesund  on  that  occasion,  when 
he  had  unveiled  a  colossal  symbolic  statue  of  Harald  Fair- 
hair.  Before  my  first  evening  closed  in,  I  hastened  to 
explore  the  length  of  the  city  right  up  Carl  Johans  Gade 
to  the  New  Park;  and  in  the  Eidsvoldplads,  a  square 
opposite  the  Storthing  House,  I  received  a  little  shock,  for 
gazing  up  at  the  new  bronze  statue  of  Harald  Fairhair,  I 
saw  the  drapery  rise  and  flutter  in  the  wind.  This  was  not 
a  replica  of  the  national  statue  at  Haugesund,  but  an  in- 
dependent design,  put  up  in  lath  and  plaster  to  see  whether 
public  opinion  approved  of  it.  It  occurred  to  me  after- 
wards that  it  was  the  symbol  of  the  stalwart  conservatism 
of  the  group  of  friends  of  whom  I  am  about  to  speak,  who 

249 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

trusted  to  their  heroic  attitude  to  impress  public  opinion — 
and  failed. 

I'>arly  next  iikh  niii;;  I  (allcij  on  jalcob  L(ikk(t  (1829- 
1881),  who  was  hcad-iiiasler  of  the  (Jiristiania  Cathedral 
School,  and  the  leadini^  educati(jnal  authority  in  Norway. 
I  had  been  able  to  be  of  some  assistance  to  Lokke  in 
London  during  the  year  1871,  and  his  hospitable  and  genial 
acquaintance  was  now'  very  valuable  to  me.  Close  to  the 
great  church  of  Our  Saviour,  in  the  centre  of  the  city,  in 
the  first  house  on  the  left-hand  side  of  the  Stor  Gade,  Mr. 
and  Mrs.  Lokke  had  an  apartment  on  the  third  storey  in 
which  they  received  a  small,  but  extremely  distinguished, 
circle  of  guests.  Lokke  was  pompous  in  manner  and  a 
touchy  man,  but  full  of  warmth  and  generosity  under  a 
somewhat  difficult  surface.  His  hospitality  to  me,  on  this 
occasion,  was  untiring,  and  it  was  wholly  owing  to  him 
that  I  was  admitted  to  the  remarkable  group  of  Norse 
Tories  who  were  making  so  resolute  and  so  vain  a  struggle 
to  stem  the  rising  flood  of  radicalism.  Lokke's  "tredie 
etage  "  in  Stor  Gade  was  a  typical  home  of  lost  causes,  and 
the  group  of  friends  were  all  ardent  supporters  of  Ibsen, 
whose  satirical  temper  was  then  looked  upon  askance  by 
the  various  popular  parties. 

The  first  person  to  whom  Lokke  presented  m^  was 
Emil  Stang  (born  1834),  the  son  of  the  then  prime 
minister  of  Norway,  Frederik  Stang,  and  a  leading 
advocate.  He  became  verv  cordial  when  he  learned  that 
I  was  bent  on  introducing  Ibsen  to  the  English  public, 
and  had  begun  to  do  so;  and  he  told  me  that  he  held  a 
brief  for  the  poet  at  that  moment.  It  will  be  remembered 
that  Ibsen  then  resided  in  Dresden.  Taking  advantage 
of  this  exile,  a  Danish  publisher  of  the  baser  sort  had 
produced  a  pirated  edition  of  the  Warriors  of  Helgoland, 
with  an  announcement  that  a  similar  reprint  of  Madam 
Inger  at  Osterraad  would  follow.  Stang  laughed  as  he 
told  me  of  Ibsen's  gigantic  anger  at  this  offence;  he  had 
immediately  put  the  matter  into  Stang's  hands,  and  had 
desired  him  to  get  a  full  indemnity  from  the  Danish  pub- 
lisher.    But   it  was  the   usual   case   of  trying  to  bleed  a 

250 


A  Visit  to  the  Friends  of  Ibsen 

stone.  The  man  would  not  even  withdraw  his  edition, 
though  no  more  was  said  of  the  projected  piracy  of  Madam 
higer.  Mr.  Stang  told  me  that  the  case- was  still  dragging 
through  the  courts;  I  never  learned  the  result. 

Lokke  took  me  to  the  University  Library  to  see  the 
Librarian,  Ludwig  Daae  (not  to  be  confounded  with  Daa), 
who  w^as  born  in  1834  and  died  in  igio.  The  visit  was 
untimely,  for  Daae  had  not  arrived,  and  only  one  single 
clerk  was  on  duty.  This  man  was  ready  to  be  friendly, 
but  he  was  being  bullied  by  the  Principal  Librarian  of 
the  University  of  Stralsund,  a  typical  loud-voiced  Prus- 
sian, to  whom  I  took  a  violent  dislike.  The  librarian  was 
acquainted  with  Lokke  and  attached  himself  to  us;  he 
spoke  with  great  contempt  of  the  Library  of  the  British 
Museum,  which  he  said  he  knew  very  well.  We  pro- 
ceeded to  the  Record  Office,  in  order  to  see  Mr.  Michael 
Birkeland  (1830-1897),  the  Master  of  the  Rolls,  of  whom 
I  shall  have  much  to  relate.  The  Record  Office 
(Riksarkivet)  was  then  in  the  same  clump  of  buildings 
as  the  Storthing  House.  We  did  not  find  Birkeland  in. 
But  we  found  an  even  more  illustrious  person,  J.  E.  W. 
Sars  (1835-1915),  who  was  already  deep  in  the  preparation 
of  those  works  which  have  made  him  famous  as  the  most 
philosophical  of  Norwegian  historians.  He  was  shortly 
after  my  visit  appointed  Professor  of  History  in  the 
University  of  Christiania. 

My  introduction  to  Ludwig  Daae  was  only  postponed. 
The  next  time  I  called  at  Lokke's  house,  a  little  shabby 
man  with  a  beard,  with  woefully  dishevelled  hair  and 
snufif-coloured  old  coat,  w^as  dancing  a  sort  of  lonely 
pirouette  in  the  middle  of  the  floor,  while  he  talked.  He 
stopped  at  my  entrance,  and  Jakob  Lokke,  coming  for- 
ward, presented  me  to  him  as  to  "the  Librarian  of  the 
University,  Ludwng  Daae."  "The  author  of  that  delight- 
ful Gamie  Kristiania?  "  I  asked.  "Ah,  do  you  know  mv 
book?"  he  said,  and  seemed  pleased.  I  felt  very  much 
drawn  to  Ludwig  Daae  from  the  first,  and  he  spoke 
Norwegian  so  plainly  and  elegantly  that  it  was  particularly 
easy  for  me  to  follow  him.     All  through  the  rest  of  my 

251 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

visit  to  Christiania  I  had  the  benefit  of  liis  kindhness  and 
wit,  his  ingenuousness  and  his  fund  of  knowledge.  Mis 
book,  Gamlc  Kristiania,  a  picturesque  series  of  essays  on 
the  history  of  the  city  up  to  1800,  was  famihar  to  me,  and 
I  had  written  a  long  review  of  it  in  the  Spectator  for 
Richard  Ilolt  Mutton,  in  which  I  had  ventured  to  say  that 
it  would  be  impossible  for  any  one  in  future  to  attempt  a 
history  of  modern  Norwegian  affairs  without  the  help  of 
Mr.  Daae's  admirable  book. 

The  name  of  this  gentleman  offered  much  difficulty, 
because,  by  a  very  odd  coincidence,  there  were  at  that 
moment  three  unrelated  persons  whose  names  were  in 
sound  identical.  There  was  Ludwig  K.  Daa,  and  tliere 
were  two  Ludwig  Daaes,  my  friend,  and  a  politician  whom 
I  did  not  meet.  Norwegians  themselves  found  the 
identity  of  the  three  very  confusing.  My  Ludwig  Daae 
had  begun  his  literary  career  with  an  ecclesiastic  history  of 
the  diocese  of  Throndhjem,  published  in  1S63,  and  had 
gradually  extended  his  range  from  church  to  general 
history,  but  his  gift  really  lay  in  the  picturesquely  bio- 
graphical. He  had  just  been  made  lector  in  aesthetics  in 
the  Cathedral  School  when  I  saw  him,  but  he  held  this 
but  a  very  short  time,  being  soon  after  my  visit  appointed 
Professor  of  History  at  the  University. 

I  had  now  the  honour  of  being  admitted  every  day  to 
the  company  of  Daae  and  his  friends,  and  it  was  clearly 
explained  to  me  that  they  formed  a  compact  and  still  in- 
fluential body  of  resistance  to  the  subversive  policy  of 
Bjornson,  Sverdrup  and  the  terrible  peasant  Jaabaek, 
whom  they  regarded  with  peculiar  apprehension.  Hans 
Christian  Andersen  had  given  me  a  note  of  introduction 
to  Bjornson,  and  in  spite  of  the  objections  of  my  new 
friends,  I  found  that  I  could  not  resist  the  temptation  to 
use  it.  Accordingly  I  went  to  the  house  in  Munke- 
damsveien  which  Bjornson  shared  with  the  philosopher 
G.  V.  Lyng  (1827-1884)  whom  I  had  met  in  Denmark. 
They  occupied  a  small  house  in  a  long  suburban  lane  on 
the  edge  of  the  city.  I  had  been  told  that  the  poet  was 
very  formidable, 'and  as  I  waited  in  the  hall,  I  heard  him 

252 


A  Visit  to  the  Friends  of  Ibsen 

growling  "Saa  !  saa?  saa  !  "  over  the  card  and  note  I  had 
sent  in.  I  quaked,  but  I  plunged;  I  was  ushered  into  a 
pretty  room  with  trellised  windows,  where  a  large  and 
even  burly  man  (Bjornson  was  then  under  forty),  who  was 
sitting  astride  the  end  of  a  narrow  sofa,  rose  vehemently 
to  receive  me.  His  long  limbs,  his  athletic  frame,  and 
especially  his  remarkably  forcible  face,  surrounded  by  a 
mane  of  wavy  brown  hair,  and  illuminated  by  full  blue 
eyes  behind  flashing  spectacles,  gave  an  instant  impres- 
sion of  physical  vigour.  He  was  truculently  cordial,  and 
lifted  his  ringing  tones  in  civil  conversation.  Resuming 
his  singular  attitude  astride  the  sofa,  he  entered  affably 
into  a  loud  torrent  of  talk,  lolling  back,  shaking  his  great 
head,  suddenly  bringing  himself  up  into  a  sitting  posture 
to  shout  out,  with  a  palm  pressed  upon  either  knee,  some 
question  or  statement. 

His  full  and  finely  modulated  voice,  with  his  clear 
enunciation,  greatly  aided  his  not  a  litrie  terrified  visitor 
in  appreciating  his  remarks,  but  he  spoke  at  great  speed, 
and  it  strained  the  attention  of  a  foreigner  to  follow  his 
somewhat  florid  volubility.  He  expressed  himself  highly 
pleased  with  the  reception  his  romances  had  received  in 
England,  but  seemed  surprised  that  his  dramas  were  not 
known.  He  recommended  to  me  a  new  viking-play, 
called  Sigurd  Jorsalfar,  which  he  had  just  sent  to  press, 
and  which  had  been  refused  "though  with  the  loveliest 
music  by  Grieg  ever  heard  out  of  a  dream  "  by  the  Royal 
Theatre  in  Copenhagen,  a  repulse  which  Bjornson  flatly 
attributed  to  the  malignity  of  the  manager,  Molbech.  He 
promised  to  send  me  to  London  a  copy  of  Sigurd  Jorsalfar 
as  soon  as  it  was  published,  and  he  was  so  amiable  as  to 
keep  his  word. 

This  little  adventure  in  the  headquarters  of  the  oppo- 
sition was  not  at  all  well  regarded  in  Stor  Gade.  Accord- 
ingly I  was  taken,  as  a  counterbalancing  influence,  to  be 
presented  at  his  country  parsonage  of  Vest  Aker  to  the  old 
poet  and  folk-lorist  Jorgen  JNIoe  (1813-1882).  Lokke  and 
Daae  were  my  companions  on  this  visit  to  the  celebrated 
collector,    in    common    with    Asbjornsen,    of    the    so   uni- 

253 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

versally  admired  Norse  legends  and  fairy-tales.  The 
situation  of  Vest  Aker  is  magnificent;  as  we  drove  past 
the  little  (liurch  to  (lie  court  of  the  "pra^stegaard,"  the 
whole  of  the  head-waters  of  the  Ciiristiania  Fjord  wound 
and  sparkled  below  us,  golden  in  the  blue  circle  of  the 
hills.  Moe,  dressed  in  clerical  black,  with  the  white  ruff 
round  his  throat,  greeted  us  delicately.  He  was  a  charm- 
ing man,  with  his  soft  voice  and  beautiful  stag-like  eyes; 
a  perfectly  gracious  and  venerable  figure,  not  incapable, 
however,  of  receiving  a  mild  excitement  from  the  fact  that 
his  poems  were  presently  to  be  introduced  to  the  English 
public.  Almost  immediately  after  my  visit  Jorgen  Moe 
was  appointed  Bishop  of  Christianssand.  As  we  came 
back  from  Vest  Aker,  my  guides  showed  me  the  grave  of 
the  biographer  and  bibliographer,  Botten-Hansen 
(1824-1869),  and  the  famous  grotto  of  Wergeland,  once 
in  the  country,  but,  already  in  1872,  touched  by  the  out- 
skirts of  the  city.  As  we  were  crossing  the  streets  in  the 
neighbourhood  of  the  Uranienborg  Church,  a  pale  old 
face  appeared  for  a  moment  at  an  upper  window.  Daae 
said  this  was  the  house  where  Johan  Sebastian  Welhaven 
(1807-1873)  was  being  nursed,  and  he  thought  that  it  was 
Welhaven  we  had  seen.  Lokke  did  not  think  it  was,  so 
that  I  shall  never  know  whether  I  did,  or  did  not,  catch 
a  glimpse  of  the  illustrious  and  the  dying  author  of  Norges 
Dcernring.  My  companions  were  much  amused,  and  I 
think  gratified,  by  my  eager  interest  in  all  these  literary 
associations. 

I  now  left  the  capital  for  a  little  tour  by  myself  in 
Ringeriget  and  Gudbrandsdalen,  where  I  had  an  invitation 
to  meet  Asbjornsen,  with  whom  I  had  corresponded  from 
London.  He  had  been  staying  at  Ringebo,  at  the  par- 
sonage of  the  Dean  (Provst)  of  Gudbrandsdalen,  Dr.  Neils 
Christian  Hald  (1808-1885).  I  did  not,  however,  go 
thither  directly,  but  at  the  advice  of  Daae,  posted  over  the 
hills  to  Drammen,  a  magnificent  drive  by  a  very  circuitous 
route.  Daae  had  given  me  letters  of  introduction  ;  he  had 
passed  his  youth  in  that  town,  and  was  Professor  of 
History  there  until  he  was  brought  to  Christiania.     His 

254 


A  Visit  to  the  Friends  of  Ibsen 

friends  received  me  with  generous  hospitality,  and  among 
the  merchant  princes  of  Drammen  I  found  a  greater 
appearance  of  luxury  than  I  happened  to  meet  with  in  the 
capital.  When  I  finally  reached  Ringebo,  I  was  dis- 
appointed to  find  that  Asbjornsen  had  been  obliged  to 
leave  for  Romsdalen,  on  his  duties  as  Torvmester  or 
Forester-General.  I  was  equally  unlucky  in  an  attempt  to 
see  th'e  poet  Kristoffer  Jansen  ( 184 1 -1899)  at  his  school- 
house  at  Fykse-in-Gausdal,  for  he  was  spending  the 
holidays  at  Tromso,  in  Finmark.  After  a  most  enjoyable 
stay  in  the  picturesque  parsonage  of  the  kind  Halds,  I 
returned  to  Christiania. 

On  the  7th  of  August  I  was  back  in  Stor  Cade,  and  was 
helping  Lokke  with  the  notes  to  a  school-book  in  English 
literature  which  he  was  just  publishing;  afterwards  we 
called  on  the  Hellenist,  Frederik  Ludwig  Vibe  (1803-1881), 
who  was  Librarian  of  the  Cathedral  School,  and  a  great 
ally  of  Lokke  and  Daae.  1  was  shown  his  translation  of 
y^schylus  into  Norse.  My  acquaintance  with  the  group 
of  Ibsen's  friends  was  now  further  extended,  for  on  the 
evening  of  the  next  day  (August  8),  Ludwig  Daae  asked 
me  to  supper,  and,  when  I  arrived,  I  found,  beside  the 
host,  Michael  Birkeland  and  Dr.  Oluf  Rygh. 

I  have  already  mentioned  Birkeland's  position  at  the 
Rolls  Office,  which  he  had  entered  in  1852,  and  now  com- 
manded. He  was  not,  I  think,  ambitious  of  literary  fame, 
and  he  had  at  that  time  published,  of  an  original  kind, 
little  except  pamphlets.  His  best-known  work  was  his 
minutelv  executed  Reports  of  the  earliest  sessions  of  the 
Storthing,  but  this  was  only  a  part  of  his  multifarious 
research  into  the  whole  political  history  of  the  country. 
Birkeland  was  the  life  and  soul  of  the  Norshe  kistoriske 
Forening  (Norwegian  Historical  Society),  which  then  and 
since  did  so  much  for  the  science  of  history.  He  w^as  con- 
stantly publishing"  for  the  government  inedited  matter 
from  the  very  copious  archives  under  his  charge.  Under- 
neath the  mask  of  the  archivist  he  barely  concealed  a 
burning  political  ambition  to  be  a  part  of  the  new  con- 
stitutional life  of  Norway.     The  Master  of  the  Rolls  was 

255 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

one  of  (he  most  attrac  tiv(.'  men  I  met  in  Scandinavia.  Me 
was  still,  in  early  middle  aij^e,  very  handsome,  well  set-up, 
with  a  fine  head  excellently  poised  above  broad  shoulders, 
and  with  brilliant,  dancing  eyes.  The  fault  of  Norwegians 
in  that  day  was  their  deadly  seriousness,  and  their  excessive 
sensitiveness  to  the  slightest  indication  of  criticism.  But 
Birkeland  was  superior  to  this  local  weakness,  and  was 
genial,  without  the  least  pomposity.  The  fourth  member 
of  our  party,  Oluf  Rygh  (1833-1899),  was  united  with 
Birkeland  in  his  devotion  to  archcTology.  He  also  had  at 
that  time  published  very  little,  but  I  was  told  that  his 
investigations  were  of  the  highest  value,  as  indeed  they 
amply  proved  to  be.  He  was  the  bosom-friend  of  Birke- 
land, with  whom  he  formed  a  singular  contrast,  being  as 
reserved  as  the  other  was  effusive,  and  a  small,  squat 
figure,  with  a  round  bald  head  and  a  bare  face,  horny  and 
spectacled,  which  reminded  my  pert  fancy  of  the  shell  of 
a  crab. 

Daae's  house,  where  we  met,  was  in  the  country,  to  the 
west  of  Christiania,  on  the  Drammensvej,  and  close  to  the 
sea,  with  a  fine  view  across  the  fjord  to  the  royal  palace  of 
Oskarshal.  There  was  much  conversation  at  supper  about 
politics,  and  my  companions  were  emphatic  in  their  con- 
viction that  the  only  hope  for  a  healthy  development  of  the 
Norwegian  nation  was  a  return  to  conservative  methods. 
Daae  spoke  with  deep  resentment  of  the  "fanatical 
measures  of  the  Radical  partv,"  and  with  horror  of  the 
present  leader  Soren  Jaaba?k  (born  1814),  who  had  just 
become  very  prominent  owing  to  his  being  refused  Holy 
Communion  by  his  parish  priest.  Pastor  Lassen,  as  a 
protest  against  his  republican  views.  My  friends  thought 
that  the  incumbent  of  Lyngdal  had  behaved  with  courage 
and  propriety  in  "fencing  the  table  "  against  him.  When 
the  meal  was  concluded,  Birkeland  proposed  my  health, 
and,  standing  up  in  the  Norse  fashion,  made  a  little 
speech.  He  said  "Englishmen  often  come  to  us  that  thev 
may  climb  our  mountains  or  fish  in  our  lakes,  but  it  is 
rare  indeed  for  a  young  man  of  letters  to  visit  us  that  he 
may    investigate    what    is    most    dear   to   us,,  our    native 

256 


A  Visit  to  the  Friends  of  Ibsen 

literature,  the  labour  of  our  hearts  and  our  heads."  He 
also  spoke  at  length  with  regard  to  the  i,ooo  years' 
festival,  which  appeared  to  occupy  the  thoughts  of  the 
whole  group. 

We  all  came  away  together,  Daae  accompanying  us 
to  the  boundary  of  the  city.  At  this  western  end, 
Christiania  then  (1872)  consisted  of  very  new  and  fantastic 
villas  whose  inhabitants,  Daae  told  me,  had  never  got  over 
the  affront  which  the  poet  Welhaven  had  paid  them  of 
calling  their  suburb  Snobopolis  :  which  name  still  stuck  to 
it.  It  was  midnight  when  we  reached  the  heart  of  the  city, 
and  as  the  hour  boomed  forth  from  the  Cathedral,  Birke- 
land  held  me  there  in  the  great  square  while  he  discoursed 
on  the  history  of  the  building,  and  on  the  vestiges  of 
Catholic  architecture  in  Norway. 

On  the  9th  of  August,  I  spent  the  morning  with  Lokke 
in  his  study,  and  then  we  paid  a  visit  to  L.  K.  Daa 
(1809-1877),  the  ethnographer  and  archaeologist.  I  have 
said  that  even  Norwegians  were  easily  confused  between 
Daae  and  Daa,  and  they  escaped  from  the  dilemma  by 
calling  the  younger  "Bibliothekaren  "  and  the  elder 
"Grasnskeren,"  the  title  of  the  newspaper  he  had  edited. 
Daa,  to  whom  I  presented  Tennyson's  message,  was 
extremely  gracious,  and  he  took  me  over  to  the  Ethnolo- 
gical Museum,  of  which  he  was  Director,  and  showed  me 
some  objects  recently  come  to  him  from  Lapland  and 
Finland.  Daa  was  a  man  of  great  eccentricity  of  appear- 
ance, tall  and  gaunt,  with  limbs  flung  wildly  about,  and 
his  fine  head  recklessly  bestrewn  with  disordered  hair, 
grizzled  and  reddish.  He  was  very  restless  and  active, 
and  talked  English  admirably ;  he  admitted  to  me  that  he 
was  a  full-blown  Anglomaniac.  Daa  was  very  much 
pleased  to  hear  from  me  that  Tennyson  recollected  their 
meeting  when  the  poet  visited  Norway  in  1858;  Daa  had 
served  on  that  occasion  as  Tennyson's  cicerone.  He  told 
me  that  there  was  great  trouble  caused  by  the  English 
poet's  extreme  near-sightedness,  which  made  him  unable 
to  drive  himself  in  the  little  karjol  which  was  then  the  only 
mode  of  conveyance  in  the  interior  of  Norway. 

257 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

Next  (1,'iy,  1  wcnl  with  Lokkc  lo  visit  llie  loxicojj^rapher 
and  inventor  oi  the  "landsniaal,"  Ivar  Aasen  (1813-1896), 
who  lived  in  one  little  room,  containing  a  bed,  two  chairs 
and  a  few  shelves  of  linguistic  books.  He  has  exercised 
an  immense  influence  on  the  language  and  literature  of 
his  country.  I  found  Aasen  a  prematurely  shrivelled  little 
man,  with  a  parcliment  face,  thin,  shy  and  nervous.  In 
conversation  he  was  dull,  until  Lokke  spoke  about  philo- 
logy, when  his  eyes  began  to  sparkle  and  his  cheeks  to 
flush.  He  talked,  then,  quite  fast,  but  with  a  curious 
inward  manner  of  speech  ;  I  confess  I  could  not  understand 
what  he  was  saying. 

In  the  afternoon  Lokke  and  Birkeland  took  me  for  a 
long  drive  to  Trognersaeteren,  a  cottage  high  up  in  the 
mountain  above  Christiania,  whence  there  is  a  magnificent 
view  over  the  whole  valley,  and  even  to  the  Swedish 
frontier.  The  fjord,  though  seven  miles  away,  seems  at  our 
feet,  and  is  visible  as  far  down  as  Moss.  Up  at  the  sa;ter  we 
were  received  by  Professor  Torkel  Aschehoug  (1822-1909), 
who  had  been  so  kind  as  to  wish  that  I  should  be  presented 
to  him.  Aschehoug  v;as  the  leading  jurist  of  Norway, 
perhaps  of  Scandinavia,  at  that  time.  His  great  book  on 
the  Laws  of  Norway,  which  was  appearing  in  slow  instal- 
ments, contained  in  a  form  never  before  approached  the 
history  and  the  essence  of  the  national  constitution.  He 
had  been  for  a  quarter  of  a  century  professor  of  civil  law 
at  the  University  of  Christiania;  he  had  taken  up,  and 
pushed  much  farther,  the  investigations  of  J.  R.  Kevser, 
when  that  eminent  jurist  died  in  1864.  But  the  extra- 
ordinary respect  with  which  Aschehoug  was  regarded  in 
the  group  of  friends  was  founded  on  other  qualities  than 
were  included  in  his  scientific  reputation.  He  had  been 
drawn  more  and  more  definitely  into  practical  politics;  for 
the  last  four  years  he  had  been  the  leading  member  of  the 
Storthing  for  Christiania.  I  was  told  that  he  was  "the 
coming  man,"  the  heaven-born  leader  of  the  constitutional 
party  which  was  about  to  reorganize  Norway,  and  drive 
back  the  onset  of  the  horde  of  radicals  and  peasants. 
I    was    told    to    observe    Aschehoug,    for    I    should    live 

258 


A  Visit  to  the  Friends  of  Ibsen 

to  see  him  the  greatest  politician  in  the  North  of 
Europe. 

When  we  found  him  at  the  ScTter,  my  companions 
greeted  him  with  a  mixture  of  warm  affection  and  deep 
respect.  He  reminded  me,  in  the  eyes  and  mouth,  and  in 
his  general  bearing,  of  Mr.  Gladstone.  Aschehoug  was 
very  polite  to  me,  but  I  found  him  alarming,  and  was 
glad  that  he  mainly  talked  politics  with  Birkeland.  In  the 
evening  Birkeland,  whose  kindness  to  me  was  untiring, 
took  me  across  to  the  eastern  side  of  Christiania,  to  Oslo, 
the  city  which  was  destroyed  to  build  the  new  capital.  He 
showed  me  what  he  believed  to  be  the  sites  of  the  mediaeval 
palace  and  cathedral ;  and,  so  far  as  he  could  judge,  the 
exact  scene  of  the  great  battle  between  Haakon  and  Skule, 
which  Ibsen  paints  in  his  Kongscmnernc.  It  was  thrilling 
to  go  over  the  vestiges  of  the  ancient  city  with  so 
enthusiastic  and  so  learned  a  guide  as  Birkeland.  As  it 
grew  late,  we  supped  together  at  a  restaurant,  and  then 
Birkeland,  in  very  high  spirits,  declared  he  would  show 
me  "  the  night-side  "  of  Christiania.  However,  we  saw 
nothing  very  exciting  or  amusing. 

Of  the  subsequent  days  of  my  visit  to  Christiania, 
whence  I  returned  to  Hull  towards  the  end  of  August,  I 
find  nothing  particular  to  relate.  My  last  evening  was 
spent  at  the  Lokkes',  in  company  with  Daae,  Birkeland 
and  a  very  lively  Mr.  Thoresen,  who  was  a  near  relative  of 
Ibsen  and  related  amusing  anecdotes  of  the  poet's 
manners.  Lokke  went  dow^n  to  the  quav  with  me  next 
morning,  and  stood  waving  his  hat  as  the  "Scotia  " 
slipped  down  the  fjord. 


259 


FAIRYLAND    AND    A    BELGIAN    ARIOSTO 

IT  has  often  been  said — it  was  said  in  a  well-known 
passage  by  the  elder  Disraeli — that  in  order  to  appre- 
ciate the  beauty  of  fairyland  we  must  make  ourselves 
as  little  children  listening  to  the  wondrous  tales  of  a  nurse. 
But  there  seems  to  be  a  fallacy  contained  in  this  explana- 
tion of  the  spell.  It  cannot  be  contrived.  No  sedate, 
crafty,  timid  old  man  of  the  world  can  make  himself  as  a 
little  child  merely  that  he  may  enjoy  certain  ancient  poetry 
in  a  melodious  stanza.  Nor,  on  the  other  hand,  is  it 
obvious  that  real  children,  especially  children  of  the 
modern  sort,  possess  that  ductile  naivete,  that  breathless 
and  delicious  credulity,  which  fairyland  demands.  I 
believe,  and  I  speak  not  without  observation,  that 
children,  as  a  rule,  like  stories  best  which  deal  with  such 
themes  as  dogs  that  run  after  ducks,  and  grown  up  people 
that  tumble  out  of  motors.  They  like  their  tales  to  be 
realistic,  rather  hard,  entirely  within  their  experience. 
Hans  Christian  Andersen,  in  his  evcntyr — so  falsely  trans- 
lated "fairy-tales" — took  advantage  of  this  fact  and  made 
a  world-wide  success  by  inventing  stories  in  which  play- 
things and  articles  of  furniture  and  animals  come  to  life 
and  act  on  the  conventional  principles  of  society.  That  is 
what-  children  like.  They  have  been  so  short  a  time 
among  us  that  the  banalities  of  experience  are  still  fresh 
to  them,  and  nothing  so  amusing  as  what  is  pure  matter- 
of-fact. 

We  may  be  quite  sure  that  The  Faerie  Queene,  which 
is  the  main  classic  of  this  sort  of  art  in  the  world's  litera- 
ture, was  not  written  for  children.  The  ordinary  infant 
would  be  unspeakably  bewildered  and  bored  by  the  visit  of 
Duessa  to  the  Lady  of  Night,  and  by  the  exploits  of 
R  261 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

Arthegal  and  Talus.  It  might  take  a  faint  pleasure  in 
Una  being  followed  by  the  Lion,  as  Mary  was  by  the  little 
Lamb;  and  the  fight  between  St.  George  and  the  Dragon 
(where  Spenser  appears  almost  at  his  worst)  might  arrest 
wondering  attention.  But  what  is  incomparable  in 
Spenser  is  exactly  what  would  fail  to  amuse  a  child.  We 
may  be  quite  sure  that  it  was  no  audience  from  the  nursery 
which  the  poet  sought  to  fascinate.  Yet  it  is  true  that  his 
poetry  appeals  only  to  the  child  at  heart.  What  we  have 
to  do  is  to  define  for  ourselves  what  we  mean  by  a  child 
at  heart,  and  we  shall  soon  perceive  that  the  object  of  our 
thoughts  is  not,  in  the  literal  sense,  a  child  at  all. 

Perhaps  youth  rather  than  childhood  is  the  image  we 
require.  With  the  advance  out  of  infancy  into  adolescence, 
the  mystery  of  existence  first  becomes  palpable  and  visible 
to  the  fingers  and  the  eyes  of  those  who  are  born  to  enjoy 
it.  We  fall  into  an  error,  however,  if  we  imagine  that 
it  is  given  to  every  ore  who  pleases  to  arrive  at  this  blissful 
condition  of  wonder.  The  world  is  very  old,  and  it  is 
troubled  about  many  things;  it  is  full  of  tiresome 
exigencies  and  solemn  frivolities.  The  denizens  of  it  are, 
as  a  rule,  incapable  of  seeing  or  conceiving  wonders.  If 
the  Archangel  Michael  appeared  at  noonday  to  an  ordinary 
member  of  the  House  of  Commons,  the  legislator  would 
mistake  his  celestial  visitant  for  an  omnibus  conductor. 
He  would  rejoice  at  having  sufficient  common  sense  and 
knowledge  of  the  world  to  make  so  intelligent  an  error. 
But  those  who  are  privileged  to  walk  within  the  confines 
of  fairyland  are  not  of  this  class.  They  are  members  of 
a  little  clan  who  still  share  the  adolescence  of  the  world; 
for,  as  this  world  is,  in  the  main,  dusty,  dry,  old,  and 
given  to  fussing  about  questions  of  finance,  and  yet  has 
nooks  where  the  air  is  full  of  dew  and  silence,  so  among 
men  there  are  still  always  a  few  who  bear  no  mark  upon 
their  foreheads,  and  move  undistinguished  in  the  crowd,  in 
whom,  nevertheless,  the  fairies  still  confide. 

It  will  be  a  surprise  to  many,  and  it  may  be  a  painful 
surprise,  to  learn  that  there  are  fathers  of  families,  persons 
"engaged   in  the   City,"  and  holding   reputable  appoint- 

262 


Fairyland  and  a  Belgian  Ariosto 

ments,  who  faithfully  believe  in  magical  princesses  and  in 
fays  that  dance  by  moonlight.  These  persons  form  the 
audience  in  whom  Spenser — as,  in  other  times  and  other 
climes,  such  poets  as  Ariosto  and  Camoens — seek  and  find 
their  devotees.  It  is  a  fact  that  there  are  people  of  a  later 
age  who  are  still  what  we  call  "children  in  heart,"  whose 
hearts  are  bold,  whose  judgment  is  free,  whose  inner  eye 
is  limpid  and  bright.  These  men  and  women  are  sensi- 
tive still,  although  the  searching,  grinding  wave  of  the 
world  has  gone  over  them.  They  live,  in  spite  of  all 
conventional  experience,  in  a  state  of  suspended  credulity. 
They  are  ready  for  any  amazement.  They  nourish,  per- 
sistently, a  desire  to  wander  forth  beyond  the  possibilities 
of  experience,  to  enjoy  the  impossible,  and  to  invade  the 
inaccessible.  Life  for  them,  in  spite  of  the  geographers 
and  the  disenchanting  encyclopaedias,  and  that  general 
suffusion  of  knowledge  (upon  all  of  which  we  congratulate 
ourselves) — life,  in  spite  of  all  these,  is  still  the  vast  forest, 
mapped  out,  indeed,  but  by  them  and  theirs  untraced. 

Persons  of  this  fortunate  temperament  store  up  an  end- 
less stock  of  good  faith  wherewith  to  face  the  teller  of 
wonderful  tales.  And  of  all  those  to  whom  they  listen, 
still,  after  three  hundred  years,  Spenser  is  the  most 
irresistible  enchanter.  It  has  always  been  admitted  that 
his  poetry  is  the  most  "poetical"  that  can  be  met  with; 
that  is  to  say,  that  it  is  the  least  mingled  with  elements 
which  are  not  of  the  very  essence  of  poetry.  More  than  all 
other  writers,  Spenser  takes  us  out  of  our  everyday 
atmosphere  into  a  state  of  things  which  could  not  be  fore- 
seen by  any  cleverness  of  our  own  reflection.  He  is  easily 
supreme  in  the  cosmogony  of  his  enchantments.  He  con- 
fessed that  his  verse  was  no  "matter  of  just  memory,"  and 
it  is  evident  that  he  did  not  wish  it  to  be.  He  simply 
resigned  himself  to  the  exquisite  pleasure  of  being  lost  in 
the  mazes  of  a  mysterious  and  fabulous  woodland. 

The  poets,  in  successive  ages,  have  delighted  in  bear- 
ing witness  to  this  witchery  of  The  Faerie  Queene.  There 
is  no  instance  of  this  more  pleasingly  expressed,  nor  more 
appropriate  to  our  argument,  than  that  of  Cowley,  who 

263 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

says,  in  his  dclicicjus  essay  Of  Myself :  "There  was  wont 
to  lie  in  my  mother's  parlour  (I  know  not  by  what  accident, 
for  she  herself  never  in  her  life  read  any  book  but  of 
devotion),  but  there  was  wont  to  lie  Spenser's  Works. 
This  I  happened  to  fall  upon  (before  I  was  twelve  years 
old),  and  was  infinitely  delighted  with  the  stories  of  the 
knights  and  giants  and  monsters  and  brave  houses, 
which  I  found  everywhere  there — though  my  understand- 
ing had  little  to  do  with  all  this — and  by  degrees  with  the 
tinkling  of  the  rhyme  and  dance  of  the  numbers."  We 
may  doubt  whether  the  child  Cowley  had  not  more  of  a 
man's  taste  than  the  man  Cowley  had  of  the  heart  of  a 
child ;  but,  at  all  events,  he  entered  with  exactly  the  proper 
spirit  into  that  miraculous  country  where  "birds,  voices, 
instruments,  winds,  waters,  all  agree."  And  it  is  in  this 
spirit  that  hundreds  of  the  elect  have  read  the  marvellous 
poem  in  successive  ages,  and  will  continue  to  read  it  until 
time  itself  has  passed  away. 

The  Faerie  Qiieene  is  not  "about"  any  thing.  There 
is  nothing  of  serious  import  to  be  deduced  from  its  line  of 
argument.  The  subject  wanders  hither  and  thither, 
awakening  fitful  melodies  in  the  brain  of  its  creator,  as  the 
wind  does  on  the  strings  of  an  ^olian  harp.  The  music 
swells  and  declines,  the  harmonies  gather  to  a  loud  ecstasy 
or  dwindle  to  a  melancholy  murmur,  under  the  caprices  of 
a  spirit  that  cannot  be  discerned  and  that  seems  to  be  under 
no  intellectual  control.  In  saying  this,  I  am  not  ignorant 
of  Spenser's  protestation  of  a  moral  purpose,  nor  do  I 
charge  him  with  the  smallest  insincerity  for  having  written 
that  apologetic  letter  to  Sir  Walter  Raleigh,  in  which  he 
makes  what  he  calls  "a  pleasing  analysis  "  of  the  way  in 
which  the  poem  illustrates  "the  twelve  private  moral 
virtues,  as  Aristotle  hath  devised."  It  was  necessary  that 
he  should  have  a  skeleton  of  meaning  underneath  his 
elaborate  dream,  not  merely  for  the  sake  of  contemporary 
decency,  lest  in  that  strenuous  age  he  should  be  cast  forth 
as  one  that  cumbered  the  ground,  but  for  the  sake  of  his 
art  as  well,  which  needed  a  steady  basis  of  material  as 
much  as  a  picture  needs  its  canvas  or  a  statue  its  marble. 

264 


Fairyland  and  a  Belgian  Ariosto 

Moreover,  The  Faerie  Queene  must  celebrate  Queen 
Elizabeth,  just  as  "Orlando  Furioso"  must  praise  the 
House  of  Este.  It  was  in  feudal  societies,  under  the  pro- 
lection  of  princes,  that  these  romantic  enterprises  had  to 
be  conducted,  if  they  were  conducted  at  all.  There  was 
a  pleasant  confusion,  like  that  of  coloured  strands  in  a 
solemn  tapestry,  between  the  laudation  of  the  Sovereign 
and  the  celebration  of  the  virtues.  Sometimes  the  monarch 
was  not  so  virtuous  as  the  poet  could  have  wished ;  some- 
times his  Court  was  as  little  like  fairyland  as  was  humanly 
possible.  That  only  added  to  the  skill  of  the  poet ; 
that  only  added  rainbow  colours  to  the  fabric  of  the 
invention. 

Then  there  was  always  the  allegory,  with  which,  in 
fact,  anything  on  earth  could  be  connected,  in  the  course 
of  which  not  only  could  no  compliment  be  excessive,  but 
no  attribution  could  be  so  certain  that  it  was  not  able, 
under  pressure,  to  be  denied.  Positive  persons,  in  our 
rash  age,  do  much  profane  the  allegory,  which,  never- 
theless, is  essential  to  all  fairy  poetry.  Without  it,  what 
would  become  of  The  Romaunt  of  the  Rose,  or  of  The 
Dream  of  Poliphile;  what,  even,  of  the  Divine  Comedy? 
Hazlitt  merrily  says  that  people  "are  afraid  of  allegory, 
as  if  it  would  bite  them.  ...  If  they  do  not  meddle  with 
the  allegory,  the  allegory  will  not  meddle  with  them." 
The  fact  is,  persons  who  hate  fairy  poetry  make  the  alle- 
gory an  excuse  for  their  aversion,  which  is  like  saying 
that  you  hate  the  flavour  of  olives  because  they  have  stones 
in  them. 

It  is  a  peculiarity  of  the  romance  of  fairyland  that  it 
never  introduces  us  to  fairies.  Nothing  is  so  prosaic  as  a 
fairy,  seen  in  the  broad  light  of  Early  Victorian  illustra- 
tion. A  little  being  in  short  skirts  and  sandals,  standing 
on  one  toe  on  the  tip  of  a  rosebud,  with  a  spangle  in  her 
sleek  hair  and  a  wand  in  her  taper  fingers — nothing  is 
more  repulsive  to  the  Muses.  But  the  whole  secret  of  the 
great  fairy  poets  is  that  they  are  engaged  in  searching  for 
fairies  without  ever  suffering  the  disenchantment  of  find- 
ing them.     There  are  none,  I  think,  in  the  broad  pages 

265 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

of  Spenser;  even,  by  a  beautiful  pleasantry,  the  Fairie 
Queene  herself  being  entirely  absent  throughout  the  poem, 
at  all  events  as  we  now  possess  it. 

The  personages  in  The  Faerie  Oucenc,  noble  and 
miraculous  as  they  are,  are  not  of  the  fairy  persuasion  at 
all.  They  wander  through  the  forests  in  the  hope  of 
coming  upon  these  supernatural  denizens,  but  they  never 
succeed  in  doing  so.  The  Holy  Grail  appeared  far  oftener 
to  the  Knights  of  the  Round  Table  than  a  real  fairy  was 
perceived  by  Paradel  or  Blandamour.  These  men  of 
chivalry  were  much  interested  in  the  subject,  but,  as  a 
rule,  they  were  poorly  instructed.  It  was  in  the  House 
of  Temperance  that  Sir  Guyon  found  the  book,  that  hight 
Antiquity  of  Faeryland,  which  seems  to  have  been  a  sort 
of  Who's  Who,  or  Complete  Peerage  of  the  supernatural 
world.     He  flew  to  the  perusal  of  it,  and  wherever  in  it 

"he  greedily  did  look, 
Offspring  of  Elves  and   Fairies  there  he  found," 

but  he  found  no  examples  on  the 

"  island,  waste  and  void, 
That   floated    in   the   midst   of  that   great   lake," 

(where  it  is  impossible  not  to  believe  that  ]\Ir.  W.  B.  Yeats 
would  have  been  more  successful). 

A  critic  has  said  that  nothing  is  closer  to  an  intensely 
lyrical  song  than  a  violently  burlesque  story.  The  sense 
of  beauty  immediately  evoked  by  the  one  is  suggested, 
conversely,  or  in  the  way  of  topsy-turvy,  by  the  other. 
This  principle  had  been  introduced  into  literature — or  at 
least  into  modern  literature,  for  the  Greeks  had  it  illus- 
trated in  Aristophanes — a  hundred  years  before  the  time 
of  Spenser,  by  the  Morgante  Maggiore  of  Pulci,  where 
Orlando,  the  pink  of  romantic  chivalry,  comes  into  collision 
with  certain  "immeasurable  giants"  and  other  wild  ab- 
surdities. The  atmosphere  of  that  poem  is  perfectly 
heroic  : 

266 


Fairyland  and  a  Belgian  Ariosto 

Twelve  Paladins  had   Charles  in  court,   of  whom 
The  wisest  and  most  famous  was  Orlando ; 

Him  traitor  Gan  conducted   to  the  tomb 
In  Roncesvalles,  as  the  villain  planned  to, 

While  the  horn   rang-  so  loud,   and  knelled   the   doom 
Of  their  sad  rout,  tlioug'h  he  did  all  knig^ht  can  do; 

And  Dante  in  his  Comedy  has  gfiven 

To'  him  a  happy  seat  with  Charles  in  heaven. 

But,  in  another  turn,  we  find  this  splendid  Orlando 
lifting  his  sword  to  give  his  beautiful  lady,  Aldabelle,  a 
smack  on  the  face  with  the  flat  of  it.  This  is  burlesque, 
and  Pulci  seems  to  have  been  the  inventor  of  the  genre. 
He  was  followed  by  Boiardo,  who  wrote  of  Orlando  in 
love,  and  by  Ariosto,  who  described  the  madness  of 
Orlando,  and  by  a  multitude  of  other  sixteenth  century 
poets,  who  described,  in  this  epic  mixture  of  lyricism  and 
burlesque,  various  other  episodes  in  the  life  of  the  hero. 
It  was  from  them,  from  these  Italian  precursors,  whom 
Spenser  had  read  so  carefully,  that  he  borrowed  the  ugly 
and  violent  elements  w^hich  he  introduces,  so  much  to  the 
scandal  of  some  critics,  into  the  embroidered  texture  of 
The  Faerie  Queene. 

In  all  this,  how^ever,  which  is  very  characteristic  of  the 
romance  of  fairy  poetry,  we  do  wrong  to  be  scandalized. 
The  ugly  things,  like  the  misfortunes  of  Braggadochio 
and  his  Squire  (in  The  Faerie  Queene),  and  the  fantastic 
things,  like  the  journey  of  Alstolfo  to  the  Moon  to  recover 
the  wits  of  Orlando  (in  Ariosto),  are  just  as  necessary  to 
our  pleasure  as  the  description  of  the  Bower  of  Bliss,  or 
of  Angelica's  flight  from  Rinaldo.  They  are  all  part  of 
that  desire  to  escape  from  the  obvious  and  the  common- 
place features  of  life  which  inspires  this  Avhole  class  of 
poetry.  Those  who  are  naturally  conscious  that  life  runs 
at  a  dead  level  desire  to  heighten  it,  and  whether  this  is 
done  in  the  lyric  spirit  or  in  the  burlesque,  or  in  both  at 
once,  matters  very  little.  The  essential  thing  is  to  lift 
the  spirit  and  quicken  the  pulse. 

The  only  consolation   which  comes  to  people  of  this 

267 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

fatigued  and  wistful  temperament  is  that  which  they  receive 
from  a  jjersuasion  of  the  reality  of  what  is  marvellous  and 
incredible.  Like  lli<'  theolo[,nans,  such  readers  believe 
certain  thinjj^s  to  be  true  because  it  is  impossible  that  they 
should  be  true.  They  do  not  ask  why,  or  where,  or  when, 
the  incidents  liappened ;  they  are  satisfied  with  the  vision 
and  with  all  its  chimerical  wonders.  In  their  dreams  they 
see  Belphcrbe  hurrying  through  the  woodland,  her  hair 
starred  as  thick  as  snow  by  the  petals  of  the  wild  roses 
her  tempestuous  flight  has  shaken  down  upon  it,  and  they 
do  not  ask  what  she  represents,  nor  whither  she  hastens, 
nor  her  relation  to  fact  and  history  : 

And  in  her  hand  a  sharp  boar-spear  she  held, 
And  at  her  back  a  bow  and  quiver  g'ay, 

Stuft  with  steel-headed  darts,   wherewith  she  quelled 
The  savagfe  beasts  in  her  victorious  play. 
Knit  with  a  golden  bauldrick,  which  forelay 

Athwart  her  snowy  breast. 

Who  needs  to  ask  whither  Belphcebe  goes,  or  what  she 
means?  She  is  a  vision  created  for  the  deep  contentment 
of  those  in  whom  the  longing  for  noble  images  and  uplifted 
desires  and  generous,  childlike  dreams  is  perennial. 

Critics  like  to  assume  that  the  enthusiasm  which  breeds 
this  kind  of  chivalrous  poetry  is  dead  and  buried  in  the 
classics.  They  no  more  expect  to  see  a  new  Faerie  Queene 
published  than  to  hear  of  a  new  dodo  inhabiting  the 
plantations  of  the  interior  of  Madagascar.  But  in  litera- 
ture it  is  always  unsafe  to  say  that  a  door  is  closed  for 
ever;  if  we  are  rash  enough  to  make  such  an  assertion, 
it  is  sure  to  fly  open  in  our  faces.  It  was  a  commonplace 
of  criticism  ten  years  ago  that  the  epic  would  never  re- 
appear in  literature,  and  behold  Mr.  Doughty  presents  us 
with  a  Daivn  in  Britain  which  is  as  long  as  the  Lusiads 
woujd  be  if  Paradise  Lost  were  tacked  on  to  the  tail  of  it. 
Last  week  I  read  in  a  very  positive  volume  that  the  Pastoral 
can  never  revisit  the  cold  glimpses  of  a  world  that  has 
exchanged  its  interest  in  shepherds  for  a  solicitude  about 

268 


Fairyland  and  a  Belgian  Ariosto 

miners  and  chauffeurs.  My  instant  reflection  on  reading 
that  opinion  was  to  wonder  how  soon  a  young  poet 
would  publish  a  fresh  set  of  Bucolics,  with  the  contest  of 
Damaetas  and  Alenalcas  set  forth  to  a  new  tune  upon  the 
Pans'  pipes. 

For  this  reason  I  cannot  say  that  I  was  astonished, 
although  much  interested,  to  find  a  young  man — and,  I 
venture  to  think,  a  young  man  of  some  genius — reviving 
the  old  music  of  the  magic  woodland,  which  had  seemed 
to  be  dead,  or  closed,  since  the  seventeenth  century.  It 
is  a  wish  to  make  his  work  a  little  known  to  English  readers 
which  has  led  me  to  venture  on  some  remarks  to-day  about 
the  Romance  of  Fairyland.  M.  Albert  iMockel  is  a 
Fleming,  and  if  M.  Octave  Mirbeau,  in  a  celebrated  article 
in  the  Paris  Figaro,  had  not  called  M.  Maeterlinck  the 
Belgian  Shakespeare,  I  should  have  been  tempted  to 
describe  M.  Mockel  as  the  Belgian  Spenser.  I  may  go 
so  far  as  to  call  him  a  Belgian  Ariosto.  M.  Mockel  has 
not  enjoyed  the  same  popularity  as  his  eminent  country- 
man ;  perhaps  he  had  no  Octave  Mirbeau  to  immortalize 
him  with  a  gorgeous  paradox.  But  in  1891  M.  Mockel, 
who  must  then  have  been  very  youthful,  published  a 
poem,  entitled  Chantefable,  which  was  enough  to  inspire 
great  hopes  of  his  future  among  not  a  few  judicious 
readers.  He  has  done  nothing,  in  my  judgment,  to 
justify  those  hopes  so  fully  as  he  now  has  in  the  volume 
he  has  published,  called,  Contes  pour  les  Enfants  d'hier, 
with  ingenious  illustrations  by  M.  Auguste  Donnay. 
These  illustrations  are  very  clever,  although  they  would 
never  have  been  drawn  had  it  not  been  for  Aubrey 
Beardsley's  Morte  d' Arthur  (1893).  M.  Donnay  is  skilful, 
and  he  emulates  Beardsley's  wonderful,  pure  line,  without 
always  perfectly  attaining  to  it. 

But  the  book  itself  is  of  a  more  classic  cast,  and  deserves 
longer  attention.  Here,  to  quite  a  remarkable  extent,  we 
find  the  old  stateliness  of  the  fabulous  society,  the  old 
ceremonial  procession  of  wonderful  events  and  incredible 
people.  Here,  once  more,  we  enter  a  world  as  audaciously 
designed  as  Ariosto's,  as  intricately  splendid  as  Spenser's. 

269 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

Here,  again,  is  what  .i  critic  of  The  Faerie  Queene  has 
called  "tlie  inexhaustible  succession  of  circumstance,  fan- 
tasy, and  incident."  'Jhe  vulgarity  of  present  existence  is 
buried  under  such  a  panoply  and  magnificence  of  fable 
that  the  grown-up  children,  the  blessed  enfants  d'hier,  can 
forget  and  ignore  it. 

It  would  be  tedious  to  retell  briefly,  in  poor  words,  the 
brilliant  stories  which  owe  so  much  to  the  solemn  and 
highly-coloured  language  in  which  they  are  deliberately 
narrated.  But  I  cannot  refrain  from  giving  an  outline 
of  the  last  of  them,  The  Island  of  Rest.  In  M.  Mockel's 
gallery  there  is  no  more  magnificent  figure  than  that  of 
Jerzual,  Prince  of  Urmonde.  We  may  call  him  the 
Roland  of  our  Belgian  Boiardo.  All  the  world  is  aware 
of  the  mysterious  end  of  Prince  Jerzual ;  he  went  away  over 
the  waves  of  the  sea,  and  nothing  was  ever  heard  of  him 
again.  But  only  M.  Mockel  knows  what  happened,  and 
he  has  now  consented  to  reveal  it. 

Jerzual  had  loved  the  ineffable  Alise,  Princess  of  Avi- 
gorre,  and  to  secure  her  love  he  had  vowed  that  he  would 
offer  her  the  suzerainty  of  the  Heights,  a  mysterious 
country  surrounded  by  peaks  of  silver  and  crystal.  Un- 
fortunately, though  he  searched  the  habitable  globe,  the 
whereabouts  of  this  marvellous  region  escaped  him.  One 
day,  in  despair,  as  he  rode  his  magic  horse,  Bellardian, 
he  came  to  the  edge  of  a  cliff,  \vhere  the  ocean  stretched  at 
his  feet.  Tired  of  his  vain  adventures,  Jerzual  flung  the 
reins  on  the  mane  of  Bellardian,  and  spurred  him  onward. 
The  obedient  steed  leaped  the  cliff,  and  descended  on  the 
surface  of  the  waters,  which  undulated  gently  beneath  him, 
but  bore  up  both  horse  and  rider.  They  galloped  over 
the  calm  sea  for  hours  and  hours,  for  days  and  days,  until 
at  last  a  fairy  island  appeared  on  the  horizon,  and  dis- 
played, as  they  approached,  a  silver  zone  of  pure  peaks, 
lifted  like  a  tiara  high  over  the  ring  of  green  and  golden 
verdure.  This  Avas  the  land  of  Jerzual's  desire,  but  neither 
the  white  Bellardian  nor  his  incomparable  master  succeeded 
in  landing  upon  that  exquisite  shore  without  prolonged 
adventures,     which    it    is    not    my    business  to  recount. 

2  TO 


Fairyland  and  a  Belgian  Ariosto 

Suffice   to  say,    that   they    sank   in   safety   on    the   sands 
at  last. 

How  they  were  discovered  there  by  Aiguehnc,  the  cruel 
daughter  of  the  Sea,  and  sole  inhabitant  of  the  island; 
how  the  heart  of  Jerzual  fluctuated  in  the  terrible  dilemma 
between  his  present  good  fortune  and  his  duty  to  the 
Princess;  how  staunch  and  uplifted  poor  Bellardian  was, 
and  how  strange  and  pitiful  his  fate ;  how  the  enchantments 
of  Aigueline  were  broken  at  last;  and  how,  when  the  dis- 
illusioned Jerzual  walked  in  frenzy  upon  the  sands  of  the 
island  shore,  he  saw  the  shallop  of  the  Princess  of  Avigorre 
sail  by,  with  banners  flying  from  it  which  were  not  his, 
but  those  of  his  rival,  Ellerion,  Prince  of  Argilea ;  this, 
and  much  more,  and  all  of  it  equally  gorgeous  and 
convincing,  must  be  read  in  the  delightful  pages  of  M. 
Mockel's  Contes  pour  les  Enfants  d'hier. 


271 


SOME  RECOLLECTIONS  OF  LORD 
WOLSELEY 

THERE  is  at  present  no  record  of  Lord  Wolseley, 
who  died  just  too  recently  to  be  included  in  the 
latest  Supplement  of  the  Dictionary  of  National 
Biography.  His  memory  loiters  in  the  limbo  which 
always  surrounds  the  famous  dead  for  a  few  years  after 
their  decease.  Then  follow,  in  due  course,  the  official  Life 
and  the  selected  correspondence;  and  so  finally  the  monu- 
ment is  unveiled  for  the  pigeons  of  the  Press  to  perch 
upon.  To  my  friends,  Sir  Frederick  ALiurice  and  Sir 
George  Arthur,  have  been  entrusted  the  duty  of  arranging 
the  memoirs  of  our  greatest  modern  soldier,  and  their  work 
will  be  formidable,  for  the  Great  War,  of  which  Wolseley, 
in  flashes  of  genius,  had  prescience,  has  swept  over  us, 
and  has  confused  the  landmarks  of  our  memories.  I  feel 
sure  that  they  will  bring  judgment  and  discretion  to  their 
task,  which  is  a  noble  one.  But  they  will  certainly,  and 
properly,  be  inclined  to  concentrate  their  effort  on  the 
military  aspects  of  their  subject,  since  Lord  Wolseley  was 
a  soldier  before  everything  else,  and  so  completely  a 
soldier  that  other  aspects  must  be  dwarfed  in  contempla- 
tion of  his  military  glory.  These  may  easily,  indeed,  be 
excluded  altogether,  and  I  therefore  venture  to  recall, 
before  it  is  too  late,  certain  scenes  which  I  observed  during 
a  prolonged  and  delighted  acquaintanceship,  in  which  the 
sword  ceased  to  be  "vambrashed,"  as  the  Elizabethans 
used  to  say,  and  in  which  the  great  general  was  simply  an 
amateur  of  letters,  eager  to  talk  about  books  and  even 
ambitious  to  write  them.  I  shall  not  fall  into  the  error  of 
describing  him  as  a  great  author,  but  I  think  that  it  may 
be    amusing    to    preserve    some    intellectual    sketch    of   a 


2 


/J 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

character  essentially  imposing  in  very  different  sur- 
roundings. 

Lord  VVolseley  was  not  prominent  iiefore  the  world  as 
a  man  of  letters,  and  I  shall  not  pretend  that  he  could 
claim  that  particular  distinction,  though  he  wrote  easily 
and  well.  Of  his  best  books  I  shall  have  something 
presently  to  say.  But  I  think  it  is  known  to  only  a  very 
few  survivors  that  he  had  a  predilection  and  even  a  passion 
for  literature,  which  he  shared,  I  should  think,  with  no  man 
of  action  of  his  time.  He  was  an  insatiate  reader,  and  his 
reading  covered  a  surprising  range.  For  a  man  to  whom 
life  offered  excitement  and  animation  in  almost  every 
direction,  it  was  notable  how  much  time  he  found  to  spare 
for  intellectual  amusement.  Me  attributed  his  love  of 
reading  to  the  influence  of  his  Irish  mother.  He  said  once 
to  me,  "I  would  sooner  live  upon  porridge  in  a  book- 
room  than  upon  venison  and  truffles  where  books  were 
not,"  and  this  meant  much  from  one  who  was  by  no  means 
indifferent  to  the  truffles  and  the  venison  of  life.  The 
curious  thing  is  that  this  obsession  with  literature  nowhere 
peeps  out  in  his  published  works,  and  is  notably  absent  in 
his  autobiography,  The  Story  of  a  Soldier's  Life,  where 
we  should  particularly  expect  to  find  traces  of  it.  For  this 
defect  in  the  general  portraiture  of  that  book  there  are 
reasons,  upon  which  I  may  touch  later  on.  It  is  a  useful 
chain  of  military  records,  but  it  is  a  portrait  of  its  author 
in  full  uniform,  with  cocked  hat  and  sword.  It  was  my 
good  fortune  to  see  him  always  in  mufti,  and  if  I  essay  a 
snapshot  of  him  I  am  bound  to  show  him  with  a  book  in 
his  hand. 

My  acquaintance  with  Lord  Wolseley  began  in  i88S, 
and  I  owed  it  to  a  common  friend  whom  I  never  cease  to 
deplore,  the  ever-ingenious  Andrew  Lang.  I  have  for- 
gotten how  these  two  came  together,  but  they  had  a  great 
appreciation  of  each  other's  company.  Wolseley  was  now 
just  fifty-five,  but  he  looked  much  vounger,  and  he 
flashed  about  as  though  the  spirit  of  April  still  laughed  at 
him.  The  first  thing  which  struck  an  observ^er  on  meet- 
ing him  was  that  he  had  the  gestures  of  a  boy;  the  elastic 

274 


Some  Recollections  of  Lord  Wolseley 

footstep,  the  abruptly  vivid  movements,  one  would  almost 
say  were  those  of  a  happy  child.  In  i88S  Lord  and  Lady 
Wolseley  were  still  inhabiting  a  small  house  in  Hill  Street, 
but  immediately  after  I  first  knew  them  they  moved  to  the 
Ranger's  House  in  Greenwich  Park,  the  scene  for  me  of 
delightful  memories  during  the  next  two  years.  Wolseley 
was  at  that  time  Adjutant-General  of  the  Forces,  under 
Stanhope,  and  afterwards  Commander-in-Chief  in  Ireland 
under  Campbell-Bannerman.  He  worked  hard  every  day 
at  the  War  Office,  and  came  down  to  Greenwich  in  the 
afternoon  like  any  civil  servant  or  bank  clerk.  His  life  at 
that  time  was  marked  by  the  serene  and  unaffected 
simplicity  which  always  seemed  to  me  the  cardinal  feature 
of  his  personal  character.  Much  in  Wolseley  had  an 
appearance  of  inconsistency.  For  instance,  it  cannot  be 
questioned  that  he  demanded  a  great  deal  from  those  who 
worked  under  him  professionally,  nor  that  he  was  careful 
of  his  own  prestige.  But  when  he  was  released  from  his 
military  work,  he  became  the  least  assuming  of  mankind. 
Moreover — and  this  makes  the  attempt  to  paint  him 
particularly  difficult — he  was  not,  to  the  public  eye,  con- 
spicuous, as  other  great  generals  have  been,  through 
demeanour  or  appearance.  I  used  often  to  be  surprised, 
when  we  were  walking  tiDgether  in  the  street,  to  notice  how 
few  people  recognized  him,  although  he  was  then  at  the 
height  of  his  celebrity. 

In  September,  1889,  when  my  wife  and  I  were  going 
over  to  the  Continent,  we  observed  a  shortish  gentleman, 
in  tourist  dress,  pacing  the  deck  of  the  steamer,  and  we 
said  to  each  other:  "Does  not  that  man  remind  you  of 
somebody?"  Presently  he  stopped  before  us,  smiling, 
and  it  was  Wolseley.  He  was  going  alone  to  Metz,  from 
which  point  he  proposed  to  make  a  tour  of  personal 
observation  round  all  the  battlefields  of  1870.  He  said 
that  there  were  inconsistencies  in  the  published  accounts, 
and  that  he  had  meditated  over  them  till  it  was  impossible 
for  him  to  rest  until  he  had  settled  his  difficulties  by 
independent  inspection.  He  told  us  not  to  say  we  had  met 
him,  and  it  was  an  example  of  that  want  of  conspicuous- 

275 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

ness,  which  I  have  noted,  that,  although  it  was  broad  day- 
light, and  he  then  one  of  the  most  famous  figures  in 
England,  no  one  else  did  seem  to  recognize  him.  He  had 
theories  about  the  Franco-German  campaign  for  which  he 
sought  confirmation.  I  begged  him  to  let  me  know  what 
the  result  might  be,  and  so  he  wrote  to  me,  from  Bruns- 
wick, on  October  4th  : 

I  postponed  writing"  to  you  until  my  tour  round  the  battle- 
fields should  have  finished,  as  I  could  not  tell  what  to  write 
upon  the  subject  until  I  had  studied  the  ground.  I  need 
scarcely  tell  you  that  I  knew  the  chief  episodes  of  each  great 
fig-ht  very  well  before  I  came  abroad.  The  German  account 
of  the  events  is  so  full  and  truthful  that  no  student  of  war 
has  any  excuse  for  ignorance.  With  that  book,  and  maps  and 
plans,  I  have  carefully  studied  every  phase  of  every  battlefield 
from  Sedan  in  the  North  to  Strasburg-  in  the  South,  and  I 
find  I  could  not  write  upon  the  subject  without  expressions 
of  opinion  that  would  be  very  unpleasant  to  many  men  now 
alive.  The  Germans  outnumbered  the  French  in  nearly  all  those 
battles  to  a  large  extent,  and  though  the  French  allowed  them- 
selves to  be  surprised,  and  their  leaders  committed  every 
possible  mistake,  the  errors  of  the  Germans  were  very  glaring 
ufKDn  many  occasions.  Almost  all  their  battles  were  not  only 
fought  in  a  manner  entirely  different  from  what  was  intended, 
but,  in  nearly  every  case,  they  were  brought  on  without,  and 
on  some  occasions  contrary  to,  the  positive  orders  and  intentions 
of  the  Generals. 

When  I  saw  him  at  Greenwich  soon  after  his  return 
he  spoke  more  plainly  still.  He  said  that  he  had  found, 
to  his  great  surprise,  that  the  Germans,  whose  luck,  he 
declared,  had  been  incredible,  had  been  very  nearly 
defeated  more  than  once  or  twice.  He  had  been  particularly 
excited  by  his  inspection  of  the  battlefield  of  Gravelotte.  If 
that  battle  had  not,  he  said,  been  won  by  what  was  really 
*^'a  fluke,"  the  day  would  have  closed  upon  the  German 
Army  in  about  the  most  unfortunate  position  an  army 
could  possibly  be  placed  in.  All  this  struck  me,  ignorant 
of  tactics  as  I  am,  as  so  very  interesting  that  I  entreated 

276 


Some  Recollections  of  Lord  Wolseley 

him  to  change  his  mind  and  write  a  complete  record  of  his 
observations  on  the  battlefields.  But  he  said  that  the 
praise  of  German  strategy  had  reached  such  a  pitch  of 
infatuation  in  England  that  he  should  be  "accused  of  all 
sorts  of  things."  Nevertheless,  I  pressed  him  to  write 
down  his  experience,  even  if  he  kept  it  private.  He  finally 
promised  that  he  would  do  so  that  winter,  but  I  never 
heard  any  more  about  it.  His  last  words  were  "I  dare  not 
publish  my  views,"  and  presently  he  had  to  go  off  to 
Newcastle  on  military  business,  which  quite  diverted  his 
thoughts.  It  must  be  observed  that  we  trusted  in  those 
days  wholly  to  German  historians,  and  that  the  French 
account,  which  confirmed  Lord  Wolseley  to  the  letter,  was 
not  published  until  ten  years  later. 

It  was  while  I  was  walking  with  him  in  Greenwich 
Park  one  afternoon  about  this  time  that  I  first  realized 
that  he  had  any  literary  ambition.  He  acknowledged  a 
constant  temptation  to  use  his  pen.  I  had  thought  of  him 
as  a  reader,  but  hardly  as  a  writer,  although  he  had 
published  his  soldiers'  Pocket-Book  for  Field  Service  some 
twenty  years  before.  I  learned  afterwards,  from  Andrew 
Lang,  that  Lord  Wolseley  had  produced  a  novel,  under 
a  feigned  name ;  this  I  had  never  seen,  and  Lang  did  not 
encourage  me  to  hunt  for  it.  But  now,  with  considerable 
leisure,  he  was  ready  to  be  encouraged  to  write  on  matters 
at  the  fringe  of  his  daily  occupation.  He  did  not,  however, 
see  any  particular  theme  lying  in  wait  for  him.  During 
a  visit  I  had  lately  paid  to  the  United  States  I  had  enjoyed 
a  good  deal  of  conversation  with  two  of  the  leading 
generals  of  the  Civil  War,  with  Philip  Henry  Sheridan 
and  with  William  Tecumseh  Sherman.  It  was  Sherman 
who  made  the  celebrated  march  to  the  sea  from  Atlanta 
to  Savannah  at  the  end  of  1864;  his  tenacity  and  clair- 
voyance delighted  Wolseley,  who  was  nevertheless  inclined 
to  blame  Sherman  for  an  excess  of  ruthlessness  in  his 
methods.  He  laughed  when  I  told  him  that  I  had  heard 
Sherman,  when  teased  at  a  supper-party  for  destroying 
some  town,  first  deny  the  charge,  and  then,  when  it  was 
daringly  repeated,  turn  round  on  the  railer  like  an  old 
s  277 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

snow-leopard,  and  cry:  "Nexl  time  I'll  burn  the  whole 
darned  city  to  the  ground." 

With  Sheridan,  Wolscley  was  in  much  more  complete 
sympathy.  He  set  him  on  the  very  summit  as  a  rii^htin<2: 
general,  and  he  said  that  he  had  contrived  a  mobility  of 
cavalry  in  action  which  was  unprecedented.  I  think  he 
had  known  Sheridan  personally  in  his  early  days  on  the 
frontier.  I  remember  his  saying  that,  if  he  himself  were 
conducting  a  great  battle,  he  should  like  nothing  better 
than  to  have  the  victor  of  Opequam  on  a  camp-stool  by 
his  side.  His  memory  took  fire  at  what  I  was  able  to  recall 
of  the  conversation  of  the  two  great  American  generals. 
His  chief  hero,  however,  was  Lee,  and  I  remember  that  he 
put  the  Confederate  general  by  the  side  of  Marlborough 
and  far  above  Wellington.  I  used  the  occasion  to  suggest 
to  iiim  that  he  should  write  down  his  ideas  regarding  the 
strategic  careers  of  these  Americans.  He  liked  the  notion, 
and  Mr.  Rice,  who  was  then  editing  the  North  American 
Review,  having  been  communicated  with,  an  invitation 
came  to  Wolseley  which  he  accepted,  and  wrote,  in  1889, 
one  or  perhaps  several  articles,  which  have  never,  I  think, 
been  reprinted.  The  life  at  Ranger's  House  was  very 
quiet;  the  Wolseleys  rarely  dined  in  town,  and  the 
General's  existence  was  almost  that  of  a  recluse.  I 
remember  we  were  all  very  much  amused  when  his  valet, 
a  dashing  character,  suddenly  gave  warning,  his  sole  cause 
of  complaint  being  that  he  was  losing  caste  by  remaining 
in  the  service  of  "so  very  quiet  a  nobleman,  w'ho  does  not 
even  go  to  the  races !  " 

All  this  was  completely  changed  in  1890  when  Wolseley 
was  appointed  Commander  of  the  Forces  in  Ireland.  He 
wrote  to  announce  the  fact  to  me  in  July,  and  said  that  it 
was  "rather  a  wrench  going,"  but  that  he  felt  he  should 
like  it  when  he  got  to  Dublin.  "A  more  active,  out-of- 
door  life  will  be  good  for  me,"  he  opined.  It  was  a  great 
business  moving  all  the  family  possessions,  for  both 
husband  and  wife  were  ardent  collectors  of  bric-a-brac, 
and  the  treasures  went  by  sea.  The  gallant  couple,  whose 
nostrils  snufTed  adventure  as  wild  horses  do  their  pasture, 

278 


Some  Recollections  of  Lord  Wolseley 

thoroughly  enjoyed  their  position  at  the  beautiful  Dublin 
house,  depressingly  known  as  the  Royal  Hospital. 
Wolseley  took  to  getting  up  at  5.30  every  morning,  and 
no  day  was  long  enough  for  his  activities  and  his  hospi- 
talities. The  political  crisis  was  more  severe  than  usual, 
but  Wolseley  cared  very  little  about  politics,  and  his 
buoyant  energy  and  boundless  good  nature  made  his 
house  the  one  bright  spot  in  an  otherwise  dismal  Dublin, 
That,  at  least,  is  how  it  struck  me  during  an  enchant- 
ing visit  I  paid  to  the  Royal  Hospital  in  the  midst  of  the 
resistance  to  Lord  Rosebery's  "predominant  partner." 
Wolseley  gave  up  any  thought  of  periodical  literature; 
when  I  urged  it  he  said  he  was  "always  being  attacked 
for  writing."  I  do  not  quite  know  who  can  have 
"attacked  "  him  or  why,  but  he  had  other  things  to 
attend  to. 

He  was  not,  however,  unoccupied.  It  was  while  he 
was  in  Ireland  that  he  composed  his  Life  of  the  Duke  of 
Marlborough,  of  which  he  finished  two  volumes  in  the 
spring  of  1893  and  published  them  a  year  later.  The  notes 
for  it  had  occupied  him  for  many  years,  he  said,  "on  board 
ship,  in  camp,  and  often  at  long  intervals  of  time  when  on 
duty  abroad  and  in  the  field."  He  made  a  tour,  as  I  well 
remember,  to  the  scenes  of  Churchill's  childhood,  before 
he  left  Greenwich  in  i8go,  and  his  descriptions  of  Ash 
House  and  the  valley  of  the  Axe  were  jotted  down  on  the 
spot.  The  Life  of  Marlborough  is  Wolseley's  principal 
contribution  to  literature.  It  is  characteristically  written, 
with  that  buoyancy  and  freshness  ^vhich  were  inherent  in 
his  nature,  but  which  do  not  appear  so  vividly  in  his  other 
publications.  The  account  of  the  Battle  of  Se4gemoor, 
which  occupies  an  entire  chapter,  is  almost  a  masterpiece ; 
this  is  Wolseley,  the  writer,  at  his  highest  level.  Unfor- 
tunately, this  admirable  book  is,  and  will  remain,  a  frag- 
ment, and  posterity  has  a  prejudice  against  what  is 
unfinished.  The  second  volume  closes  in  1702,  when 
Marlborough's  political  intrigues  had  come  to  an  end  and 
William  III.  was  placing  him  at  the  head  of  the  allied 
forces  in  Flanders.     This  was,  of  course,  the  division  of 

279 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

his  career,  and  naturally  closed  a  volume.  But  the  mili- 
tary fun  was  only  just  going  to  begin,  and  what  everybody 
wanted  from  Lord  Wolseley,  of  all  men  in  the  world,  was 
an  account  of  the  great  campaigns. 

This,  however,  was  never  performed,  why,  we  can  only 
conjecture.  The  book  was,  on  the  whole,  very  well 
received,  but,  naturally,  everyone  noted  that  it  stopped  in 
the  middle  of  the  story.  In  answer  to  an  anxious  inquiry 
which  I  sent  off  on  receiving  my  copy  of  the  two  volumes, 
Wolseley  wrote  : 

I  hope  the  book  will  pay  the  publisher.  If  it  does,  I  shall 
write  the  military  part  of  Marlboroug-h's  life,  which,  of  course, 
would  be  to  me  a  more  interesting-  undertaking-  than  describing 
my  hero  through  a  period  already  well  known  from  the  pages 
of  our  greatest  historical  novelist,   Macaulay. 

This  shows  that,  in  April,  1894,  no  part  of  the  con- 
tinuation was  actually  written,  but  I  doubt  not  that  he  had 
made  copious  notes  of  some  of  the  1 702-1710  campaigns. 
Indeed,  on  one  occasion  much  later,  when  I  w^as  trying 
to  urge  him  to  return  to  so  congenial  an  enterprise,  he  told 
me  that  the  Battle  of  Malplaquet  was  actually  finished; 
and  Mr.  Richard  Bentley  informs  me  that  this  MS.  was 
actually  at  one  time  in  his  father's  hands.  Wolseley  also 
is  known  to  have  described  the  march  along  the  Danube 
in  1705,  but  not  reaching  the  Battle  of  Blenheim.  These 
fragments  must  surely  exist  among  Lord  Wolseley's 
MSS.,  and  I  urge  Sir  George  Arthur  to  make  careful 
search  for  them.  They  ought  to  be  well  w^orthy  of  pubh- 
cation.  That,  at  the  age  of  sixty-one,  and  in  active  State 
employment.  Lord  Wolseley  did  not  feel  able  to  pursue 
his  hero  over  the  innumerable  battlefields  from  Venloo 
to  Oudenarde  is  easily  comprehensible,  but  that  he  should 
have  stopped  just  where  he  did  is  lamentable.  We  may 
wish  that  he  had  been  inspired  to  start,  instead  of  stopping, 
at  1702. 

A  side  of  Lord  Wolseley's  mental  temperament  which 
was  little  known  was  his  sympathy  with  the  imaginative 

280 


Some  Recollections  of  Lord  Wolseley 

literature  of  the  East.  He  could  not,  I  suppose,  be  called 
a  scholar,  but  he  had  more  acquaintance  with  Oriental 
languages  than  was  generally  suspected.  In  particular, 
the  poetry  of  Persia  exercised  a  great  fascination  over  him. 
He  studied  both  Persian  and  Hindustani  for  a  couple  of 
years,  and  kept  a  learned  Munshi  with  him  all  that  time 
as  a  travelling  tutor.  This  man  had  a  passion  for  the 
poets,  and,  as  Wolseley  told  me,  constantly  held  him  in 
conversation  on  the  subject  of  Persian  history  and  made 
him  read  Persian  books.  Wolseley  learned  quotations 
from  the  poets  by  heart,  and  afterwards,  in  speaking  with 
exalted  or  highly-educated  natives  of  India,  he  found 
that  the  apt  introduction  of  such  tags  from  the  classics 
was  greatly  appreciated,  and  was  made  the  subject 
of  compliment.  Wolseley  was  very  amusing  about 
this. 

As  I  happened  to  be  President  of  the  Omar  Khayyam 
Club  in  1897,  I  thought  that  a  speech  from  the  Field- 
Marshal  at  the  annual  banquet  would  introduce  a  charm- 
ing novelty  into  that  mild  orgy  of  red  wine  and  red  roses. 
Although  very  busy,  for  he  had  lately  been  made  Com- 
mander-in-Chief, he  "jumped,"  as  we  say,  at  the  invitation, 
and  made  his  appearance  as  the  Guest  of  the  Evening.  It 
was  not  for  me  to  hint  procedure  to  so  illustrious  a  visitor, 
but  I  confess  I  dreaded  lest  the  clash  of  swords  might  jar 
a  little  on  our  floral  festivity.  I  need  have  had  no  fear. 
When  the  moment  came  for  Lord  Wolseley  to  rise  (he  had 
told  me  that  he  felt  so  shy  that  his  "heart  was  in  his 
mouth,"  but  he  showed  no  sign  of  discomposure)  he 
assured  the  company  that  he  had  been  misrepresented  as 
a  man  of  blood,  but  that  he  was,  on  the  contrary,  a  lover 
of  roses  and  red  wine.  He  confessed  that  he  knew  Omar 
only  in  the  translation  of  FitzGerald;  I  was  aware — but 
kept  my  counsel — that  he  had  only  known  that  since  his 
invitation  to  dine.  He  said  that  in  India  he  had  never 
heard  the  name  of  Omar  pronounced,  but  he  expatiated 
largely  on  those  of  Hafiz  and  Firdousi.  The  rules  of  the 
Club  excluded  reporters,  and  I  have  always  been  sorry 
that  no  record  survives  of  this  charming  little  discourse. 

28t 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

What  does  survive  is  a  delicious  poem  in  Austin  Dobson's 
best  vein,  which  was  handed  round  to  the  guests  in 
privately  printed  form.  This  piece  described  the  scene  and 
those  present,  beginning  with 

I   note 
Our  Kustiim   here,   without  red  coat, 

a  touch  which  pleased  the  Field-Marshal. 

Lord  Wolseley  had  taken  an  active  part  in  the  Chinese 
War  of  i860,  and  I  remember  his  telling  me  that  on  his 
appointment  as  deputy  to  accompany  Sir  Hugh  Grant  to 
Hong-Kong  he  ransacked  every  library  and  bookshop  in 
Calcutta  for  books  about  China.  His  account  of  the  cam- 
paign, up  to  the  surrender  of  Pekin  in  November,  i860, 
was  published  in  his  Narrative  of  the  War  with  China,  a 
work  founded  on  the  letters  he  sent  home  by  each  succes- 
sive mail;  it  can  conveniently  be  read  in  chapters  XXVH. 
to  XXXI.  of  The  Story  of  a  Soldier's  Life.  But  what  is 
not  told  there  is  that  he  preserved  to  the  end  of  his  days 
a  very  sympathetic  interest  in  the  civic  manners  of  the 
Chinese,  whom  he  preferred  to  any  other  Oriental  race, 
having  at  one  time  or  another  tested  them  all.  In  his 
published  writings  Lord  Wolseley  dwells  mainly  on  the 
perfidy  of  the  ruling  classes  in  China,  and  on  the  ease  with 
which  Lord  Elgin  allowed  himself  to  be  taken  in  by  the 
treacherous  Chinese  Ministers.  He  expressed  horror  at 
the  crime  of  the  escort  who  beheaded  Captain  Brabazon  at 
the  Pa-li-cheaou  Bridge,  an  event  which  had  a  peculiar 
effect  on  W^olseley,  because  it  was  by  a  mere  accident 
that  Brabazon,  at  the  last  moment,  had  taken  Wolseley's 
place  in  his  absence  on  another  business.  The  want  of 
elementary  scruple  in  the  Chinese  authorities  was  shocking 
to  a  straightforward  British  soldier.  But,  after  all,  we 
were  at  war  with  them. 

On  the  other  hand,  what  Wolselev  loved  to  expatiate 
on  in  private  conversation  was  the  sterling  virtue  of  the 
ordinary  Chinese  civilian.  I  recollect  how  on  one  occa- 
sion, when  Sir  Francis  de  Winton  was  dining  at  Ranger's 

282 


Some  Recollections  of  Lord  Wolseley 

House,  and  expressed  some  views  over-indulgent  to  the 
Turks,  Lord  Wolseley  turned  upon  him,  sparkling  with 
indignation,  and  swore  that  no  Turk  could  hold  a  candle 
to  a  Chinaman,  the  cleanest,  the  most  temperate,  the  most 
philosophical  creature  in  the  world.  In  vain  did  De 
Winton  protest  that  he  meant  no  dishonour  to  China. 
Wolseley  w^as  started  on  his  hobby-horse,  and  gave  us  no 
peace  till  he  had  delivered  quite  a  little  oration  on  the 
wonderful  merits  of  the  disciples  of  Confucius.  This  Avas 
in  1889,  and  long  afterwards  the  zeal  for  China  was  eating 
him  up  at  intervals.  I  find  a  letter  to  myself,  dated 
April  17th,  1901,  in  which  he  tells  me  that  he  is 
reading  Professor  H.  A.  Giles's  History  of  Chinese 
Literature : 

I  wonder  how  deep  he  has  gone  in  it.  The  only  man  I 
ever  knew  who  bad  more  than  dipped  intO'  that  vast  subject 
was  Sir  T.  Wade,  an  old  friend  of  mine.  I  have  known 
many  men  who  spoke  Chinese  well,  some  even  spoke  it  fluently 
— Sir  Harry  Parkes,  for  instance — but  Wade  was  the  only 
Englishman  I  ever  met  who  had  probed  down  deep  intO'  the 
Chinese  classics.  He  often  laughed  at  the  notion  of  any  Fan 
qui  being  well  acquainted  with  them,  so  great  was  their  volume 
and  so  numerous  the  works  to  be  studied.  Indeed  very  few 
Chinamen  are  thoroughly  well  read  in  their  own  classical 
literature.  When  we  moved  upon  the  Summer  Palace  in  i860, 
the  Emperor  fled  in  haste,  leaving  upon  a  little  table  the  book 
he  had  just  been  reading.  I  always  regretted  not  having  taken 
possession  of  it,  instead  of  letting  it  be  destroyed.  It  was  a 
classical  work. 

On  the  night  of  October  12th,  1899,  w^hen  the  Boer 
war  was  declared,  my  wife  and  I  shared  with  Lord  and 
Lady  Wolseley  a  box  at  the  performance  of  Shakespeare's 
King  John.  Like  almost  everyone  else  except  Kitchener, 
the  Commander-in-Chief  assured  us  that  the  war  would 
be  a  short  one ;  he  w- as  radiant  and  calm  on  that  memorable 
evening.  There  were  many  verses  in  the  play  which 
seemed  appropriate  to  the  occasion,  and  when  King  John 
declaimed — 

283 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

Here  have  we  war  for  war,  and  blood  for  blood, 
Controlment  for  controlment. 

Wolseley  whispered  "and  Victoria  for  Mr.  Kriiger  !  "  It 
was  exhilarating-,  though  as  it  turned  out  not  wholly 
satisfactory,  to  listen  to  King  John's  proud  reply  to 
Chattilion  :, 

For  ere  thou  canst  report,  I  will  be  there ; 
The  thunder  of  my  cannon  shall  be  heard — 
So  hence  ! 


But  I  must  not  trespass  within  the  circle  of  our  coming 
(disenchantment. 

A  few  months  later  Lord  Wolseley  handed  over  the 
Command-in-Chief  to  Lord  Roberts,  and  he  presently  re- 
tired to  a  farmhouse  at  Glynde,  near  Lewies,  where  he 
resided  for  a  number  of  years,  more  and  more  secluded 
from  the  world,  but  devoted  to  his  garden  and  his  books. 
Once  more  he  became  a  voracious  reader  of  miscellaneous 
literature.  Here  he  liked  to  be  informed  of  what  was  going 
on  in  the  world  of  letters,  and  to  see  as  frequently  as  he 
could  a  few  friends  who  wrote.  Among  these,  I  think 
there  was  none  whom  he  valued  more  than  Henry  James, 
a  very  old  friend,  earlier,  I  think,  than  Andrew  Lang  or 
myself.  It  might  be  supposed  that  there  was  little  in 
common  between  the  active  soldier  and  the  exquisite  and 
meticulous  dreamer,  but,  on  the  contrary,  their  mutual 
esteem  was  persistent,  and  Wolseley  delighted  in  the  con- 
versation of  Henry  James,  although  he  sometimes  allowed 
himself  to  smile  at  the  novelist's  halting  and  deliberate 
utterance.  Wolseley,  on  the  other  hand,  was  an  emphatic, 
spontaneous  talker,  not  very  particular  in  selecting  the 
very  best  word  or  in  rounding  the  most  harmonious 
period.  It  was  amusing  to  hear  them  together,  the  one 
so  short  and  sharp,  the  other  so  mellifluous  and  hesi- 
tating, yet  their  admiration,  each  for  the  other,  was 
continuous. 

I  do  not  think  that  Wolseley  was  ever  more  happy  than 

284 


Some  Recollections  of  Lord  Wolseley 

in  the  first  years  of  his  residence  at  Glynde,  the  world 
forgetting,  by  the  world  forgot.  But  a  certain  insidious 
melancholy  soon  began  to  invade  him.  He  gradually  cut 
himself  off  from  all  his  round  of  London  engagements,  and 
he  never  once,  if  I  remember  right,  attended  the  House  of 
Lords  after  his  retirement  from  the  War  Office.  He  was 
not  in  the  least  degree  invalided  or  deprived  of  nervous 
energy,  but  he  felt  that  in  the  long,  strenuous  years  of 
service  he  had  earned  a  holiday,  and  now  he  took  it.  He 
made,  perhaps,  few  new  friends,  but  he  was  careful  to 
cultivate  the  old  ones,  and  no  one  was  ever  more  assiduous 
in  the  art  of  friendship.  He  clung  to  old  associations  and 
to  old  faces — "they  can't  escape  me,"  I  remember  his 
saying.  He  liked  to  see  them  at  Glynde,  where  they 
always  received  a  glowing,  almost  a  boisterous,  welcome. 
The  house  lies  in  a  sort  of  glen  between  two  ranges  of  the 
beautiful  Sussex  downs,  and  Wolseley  loved  to  climb  these 
eminences  with  a  familiar  companion.  He  was  particu- 
larly apt  to  take  such  a  friend  eastward  along  the  lanes 
to  Firle  and  then  up  to  the  summit  of  the  beacon  above 
Alciston.  This  was  one  of  his  favourite  afternoon  ex- 
cursions, and  from  this  vantage  he  would  sweep  the  coast- 
line from  Seaford  to  Pevensey,  and  dilate  on  its  strategic 
capabilities. 

Of  such  excursions  as  these  I  have  the  happiest 
memory.  The  exercise  always  seemed  to  stir  the  General's 
brain  to  especial  activity.  His  rapid,  vehement  voice  rang 
out  in  full  sonority  in  the  silence  of  the  great  rolling  Down, 
and  his  thoughts  seemed  to  move  with  more  ease  than  usual 
in  the  high,  cold  air  of  autumn.  His  imagination  worked 
with  a  vitality  which  almost  persuaded  his  ignorant  com- 
panion that  he  also  was  a  strategical  genius,  so  easy  did 
the  problems  of  military  movement  seem  when  outrolled 
by  Wolseley 's  warm  voice  and  punctuated  by  the  sweep 
of  his  walking-stick.  It  was  impossible  not  to  feel  that 
"this  exceptional  combination  of  mental  gifts  with  untiring 
physical  power  and  stern  resolution  "  made  our  wonderful 
friend  unique  in  his  class  and  time.  One  was  amazed  to 
find  one's  self  entrusted  with  the  professional  secrets  of 

285 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

which  one  was  really  so  unworthy  a  recipient.  But  it  was 
characteristic  of  Wolseley  that,  with  all  his  fire  and  abrupt- 
ness, he  was  incapable  of  the  smallest  element  of  patronage. 
He  lifted  his  friends,  in  a  whirl  of  generous  illusion,  up 
to  a  level  with  himself,  and  insisted  on  their  sharing  his 
conceptions.  No  one  ever  possessed  a  more  fascinating 
gift  for  persuading  the  person  he  talked  with  that  the 
friend's  powers  and  capacities  were  equal  to  his  own.  The 
impression  could  only  be  momentary,  but  it  was  extremely 
grateful  while  it  lasted. 

Few  things  in  private  conversation  are  more  winning 
than  lack  of  discretion.  I  cannot  pretend  that  Lord 
Wolseley  was  a  cautious  speaker,  and  I  think  his  company 
would  have  been  much  less  entertaining  than  it  was  if  he 
had  minced  his  words  or  hedged  his  opinions.  He  had 
spent  twenty  years  or  more  of  his  life  in  a  prodigious 
enterprise,  no  less  than  the  entire  remodelling  of  the  British 
Army.  He  had  seen  with  Napoleonic  clearness  what 
sweeping  reforms  were  needed,  and  he  had  not  felt  the 
smallest  hesitation  in  setting  about  their  introduction.  But 
he  had  originally  been  quite  alone  in  this  perilous  enter- 
prise. Hercules  had  come  to  the  cattle-yard  of  Augeas 
and  had  found  it  clogged  with  the  mire  of  generations. 
He  set  about  turning  the  course  of  Alpheus  and  Peneus, 
rivers  of  Whitehall,  and  he  sent  their  waters  rushing 
through  the  stable.  With  his  besom  he  began  to  scrub 
the  refuse  out  of  every  corner.  But  the  old-fashioned 
stablemen  were  not  pleased  to  be  disturbed,  and  Augeas, 
in  consternation,  refused  to  give  Hercules  his  reward. 
Thereupon  there  arose  loud  and  lasting  clamours,  in  the 
midst  of  which  the  work,  frustrated  as  far  as  mediocrity 
found  possible,  went  forward  steadily,  but  in  a  wind  of 
exasperation.  There  was  rage  on  both  sides,  recrimina- 
tion, injury;  and  even  the  monarch  of  Elis  was  not  dis- 
engaged from  the  struggle.  If  these  things  are  an  alle- 
gory, it  is  a  very  transparent  one,  and  it  need  not  be 
translated.  It  suffices  to  say  that  he  would  have  little 
insight  into  human  character  who  should  express  surprise 
at  any  vehemence  of  expression,  with  regard  to  those  who 

286 


Some  Recollections  of  Lord  Wolseley 

opposed  his  cleansing-  activities,  which  the  Nemean  hero 
might  give  way  to  in  private  conversation.  He  was  tired 
with  fighting  those  of  his  own  household  and  he  was 
sick  from  the  stupidity  of  persons  clothed  with  brief 
authority. 

If,  however,  Lord  Wolseley  expended  the  treasures  of 
what  could  at  call  be  a  very  lively  vocabulary  on  the  men 
who  had  hindered  his  life's  work,  nothing  could  exceed 
his  loyal  memory  of  the  few  who  had  found  courage  to 
support  him.  Among  the  latter,  Mr.  Cardwell  and  Lord 
Northbrook  stood  pre-eminent,  particularly  the  former, 
of  whom  I  remember  many  tributes  of  the  warmest  appre- 
ciation. I  have  often  heard  Wolseley  say  that  he  came 
back  from  the  Crimea  with  a  sense  of  horror  at  all  the 
shortcomings  of  our  military  system,  and  that  his  criti- 
cisms met  W'ith  none  but  the  most  languid  attention  except 
from  Cardwell.  It  was  a  highly  fortunate  circumstance 
that  these  two  came  together,  for  Cardwell  at  home  in 
England  had  come  to  the  same  conclusions  as  Wolseley 
had  in  the  four  quarters  of  the  globe.  He  was  able,  as 
Secretary  for  War  from  1868  to  1874,  to  put  into  practical 
shape  the  ideas  which  Wolseley  had,  by  his  high  gift 
of  imagination,  seen  in  the  field  itself  to  be  necessary. 
Wolseley  believed  that,  but  for  Cardwell's  unflinching 
support,  his  enemies  would  have  contrived  to  have  him 
honourably  deported  to  some  command  at  the  Antipodes 
where  his  tiresome  brain  would  have  ceased  to  worry  the 
War  Office.  The  fiercest  of  the  fight  gathered  about  the 
year  1872,  when  "the  old  school"  would  hardly  believe 
that  anyone  calling  himself  a  gentleman  could  make  him- 
self so  intolerably  objectionable  as  did  this  horrible  Sir 
Garnet  Wolseley.  At  this  time  Cardwell,  in  the  face  of 
every  species  of  intrigue  and  resistance,  shielded  his 
assistant  from  his  opponents.  Later  on  he  helped  him  to 
collect  around  him  the  ablest  soldiers  of  promise  on 
whom  the  army  of  the  future  depended.  I  never  heard 
Wolseley  speak  of  anyone  with  so  much  regret  as  of 
Cardwell,  cut  off,  by  failing  health,  in  the  midst  of  his 
labours. 

287 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

It  was  Lord  Northbrook  who  chiefly  aided  and  abetted 
Wolseley  in  his  scheme  for  sending  General  Gordon  off  up 
the  Nile.  When  the  tragedy  was  complete,  Lord  North- 
brook  inclined  to  think  that  their  action  had  been  "a 
terrible  mistake."  But  Wolseley  never  would  admit  that 
it  had  been  a  mistake.  He  persisted  that  it  was  the  only 
thing  to  do,  and  that  the  responsibility  for  failure  rested  on 
Mr.  Gladstone  and  his  Government.  There  was  nothing 
that  Wolseley  loved  better  than  to  recount  the  adventure 
of  his  seeing  Gordon  off  to  the  Soudan  on  November  i8th, 
1883,  and  his  dramatic  conversation  at  the  London  railway 
station.  Gordon  was  settled  in  the  train  when  Wolseley 
asked:  "By  the  way,  General,  I  suppose  you  have  plenty 
of  money?"  "Not  a  penny!"  And  Wolseley  would 
recount  how  he  dashed  in  a  hansom  to  his  bank,  and 
brought  back  the  bank-notes  just  in  time  for  the  perfectly 
indifferent  Gordon  to  slip  them  into  his  pocket  as  the  train 
went  off. 

Before  he  left  town  in  1900  Lord  Wolseley  had  begun, 
at  the  suggestion  of  some  of  his  friends  who  regretted  that 
so  much  high  experience  of  life  should  be  wasted,  to  pre- 
pare his  own  autobiography.  As  I  took  a  special  interest 
in  this  project,  I  was  told  (December  ist,  1900),  that  he 
had  "written,  at  odd  moments,  many  pages  for  the 
Memoirs,  but,  of  course,  they  have  still  to  be  pumice- 
stoned  down  and  put  into  shape."  The  sudden  cessation 
from  all  administrative  activity  had  threatened  to  be  rather 
disastrous,  but,  as  I  have  said,  he  took  his  retirement  to 
Glynde  very  serenely,  and  this  business  of  the  autobio- 
graphy promised  to  be  the  best  antidote  to  languor. 
When  one  saw  him  in  the  next  years,  it  stood  always  in 
the  background;  its  progress  was  reported  like  the  growth 
of  a  slow  fruit,  which  stuck  on  the  bough,  but  was  not 
swelling  as  it  should.  At  last,  in  his  seventy-first  year,  I 
received,  not  without  surprise,  the  announcement  that  it 
was  ripe  and  ready  for  the  market.  A  little  further  delay, 
and  there  appeared,  in  two  fat  volumes.  The  Story  of  a 
Soldier's  Life.  The  copy  which  reached  me  from  the 
author  generouslv   acknowledged  the   "valuable  advice  " 

288 


Some  Recollections  of  Lord  Wolseley 

that  I  had  "so  often  kindly  given."  But  I  dare  not  take 
this  tribute  to  my  soul,  for,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  book 
bears  no  trace  of  external  advice.  It  is  a  very  strange 
production,  and  may  be  succinctly  described  as  an  editing 
from  earlier  records  by  himself  of  fragments  of  a  story  the 
details  of  which  the  author  had  forgotten. 

There  is  no  question  that,  as  an  autobiography,  The 
Story  of  a  Soldier's  Life  is  disappointing.  It  was  under- 
taken too  late,  and  it  could  never  have  been  written  at  all, 
save  for  the  fact  that  Wolseley  had,  in  earlier  years,  kept 
copious  journals  and  written  long  letters  when  he  was 
abroad  on  his  various  campaigns.  These  letters  and 
journals  were  collected  and  typed,  and  a  secretary  helped 
to  put  them  together  and  give  a  certain  amount  of  cohesion 
to  the  narrative.  The  book  was  strangely  edited;  the 
preface  appears  in  the  second  volume,  the  dedication  is 
repeated  twice,  there  is  no  account  whatever  of  the  circum- 
stances in  which  the  Memoir  was  compiled.  What  is  more 
serious  is  that  the  personal  and  intimate  life  of  the  author 
is  entirely  neglected.  When  he  had  not  before  him  letters 
from  the  Crimea  or  the  Red  River,  from  China  or 
Ashantee,  he  had  nothing  to  go  upon  but  the  news- 
papers. 

The  sad  cause  of  all  this  cannot  be  concealed. 
Although  his  physical  health,  and  indeed  in  essentials  his 
mental  health,  were  unimpaired,  he  had  begun  to  suffer 
from  a  radical  decay  of  memory.  This  was  already 
becoming  obvious  before  he  left  the  War  Office,  and  it 
grew  rapidly  in  intensity.  It  was  a  very  curious  infirmit)^, 
for  it  dealt  chiefly  w^ith  what  I  may  call  immediate  memory. 
For  instance,  in  these  later  years,  if  an  old  friend  came  to 
see  him  on  a  carefully  prepared  visit,  he  would  recognize 
him  instantly,  with  the  old  ardour,  but  would  say  :  "I'm 
delighted  to  see  you,  no  one  told  me  you  were  coming  !  " 
If  a  little  later  on  the  same  occasion  he  was  called  awav 
for  a  few  minutes,  he  would  return  with  a  repeated  wel- 
come :  "Oh  !  how  nice  to  see  you — nobody  told  me  you 
were  coming  !  "  This  painful  afifiiction  has  to  be  men- 
tioned, if  only  because  it  explains  the  strange  construction 

289 


Aspects  and  Impressions 

of  The  Story  of  a  Soldier's  Life.  It  grew  upon  him,  until 
it  wove  a  curtain  which  concealed  him  from  all  inter- 
course with  the  world.  In  perfect  physical  health,  but 
needing  and  receiving  the  most  assiduous  attention,  he  lived 
on,  mainly  at  Mentone,  until  he  completed  his  eightieth 
year.  But  his  wonderful  and  beneficent  life  had  really 
come  to  an  end  ten  years  earlier. 

1921. 


290 


INDEX 


Aasen,  Ivar,  his  influence  on  Norse 
language  and  literature,  258 

Ablancourt,  Tallemant  des  Reaux 
and,  114 

Academic  Committee,  an  English, 
and  its  functions,  145 

Academic  Frangaise,  and  its  founda- 
tion, 145  et  seq. 

Acton,   Lord,   3,    15 

Adam  Bede,  4,  8 

Agatha,  12 

Aitken,  George  A..  77-78 

Album,   The,  by  Henry  James,  33 

Alcidalis  et  Z elide,  116 

Alexander,  George,  33 

Allegory,  the,  as  an  essential  to 
fairy  poetry,  265 

Alma,  Prior's,  79 

Alps  and  Sanctuaries,  74 

Altar  of  the  Dead,  The,  18 

Ambassadors,   The,   44 

American  Scene,   The,   45 

American,  The,  25,  31 

American  A'^olunteer  IMotor  Ambu- 
lance Corps,  Henry  James  and, 
52 

Amos  Barton,  6,  9 

Anactoria,  Swinburne's  first  draft 
of,  87  et  seq. 

Analogy  of  Religion,  Joseph  Butler's, 

73 

Anaxandre  et  Orazie,   154 

Andersen,  Hans  Christian,   261 

Angelo,  Michel  [see  IMichel  Angelo) 

Angennes,  Charles  d'  {see  Ram- 
bouillet.  Marquis) 

Anglican  revival,  the,  its  opposite 
school,  64 

Anglo-Catholic  movement,  the,  186 

Antilly,  Arnauld  d',   161 

Arago,  Etienne,  Clemenceau's  in- 
troduction to,  227 

Ariane,  Desmarets's,  154 

Arion,  G.  Eliot's,  13 


Ariosto,  263,  267 

Arnold,  Matthew,  3,  203 

Arthur,  Sir  George,  and  the  memoirs 

of  Lord  Wolseley,  273 
Asbjornsen,    Norwegian   folk-lorist, 

253 
Aschehoug,  Prof.  Torkel,  24S,  258 
Asquith,  Right  Hon.   H.   H.,  53 
Assommoir,  L' ,  24 
Atalanta  in  Calydon,  95 
Atlantic  Monthly,  the,  Henry  James 

as  contributor  to,  21 
Aubigne,  Agrippa  d',  and  Malherbe, 

143 
his  definition  of  satire,  102 
Aubrey,    John,    as    memoir-writer, 

113 
Auchy,  Vicomtesse  d',  no,  137 
An  Fils  des  Jours,  242 
Author  of  Beltraffio,   The,  30 
Authoress  of  the  Odyssey,   The,  74 
Avenir  dc  la  Science,  L',  237,  243 
Awkifard  Age,  The,  38,  43 


B 

Bach,   J.    S.,  Samuel    Butler    and, 

70 
Bsetzmann,    Samuel,  editor  of  Dag- 

bladet,  249 
Bage,  Robert,  173 
Balzac,  Honore  de,  6,  211 
Balzac,  Jean   Louis  Guez  de,   137, 

160-168 
Banville,  Theodore  de,  2or 
Barde  de  Temrah,  he,  198 
Barres,  Maurice,  38 
Bartas,  Salluste  du  (see  Du  Bartas) 
Baudelaire,   222 
Bautru,   165 
Beardsley,  Aubrey,  269 
Beast   in    the   Jungle,    The,    Henry 

James's,  45 
Bedford,  Coimte.ss  of,  and  her  salon, 

100 


291 


Inde 


X 


Beethoven,  Samuel  Butler's  con- 
tempt for  music  of,  70 

Bcllay,  J.  du  {sr.e  i)u  Bellay) 

Bellini,  Gentile,   70 

Benson,  Archbishop,  and  Henry 
James,  38 

Bentley,  Mr.  Richard,  280 

Bei'ger  Extravagant,  Le,  161 

Bertaut,  Jean,   134,   138 

Better  Sort,  The,  45 

Beuil,  Honorat  de  {see  Racan) 

Birkeland,  Michael,  251-259 

Bjornson,   Bjorustjerne,  252-3 

Blake,  William,  69 

Boiardo,  267 

Boileau,  and  Desmarets,  154 

Boisrobert,  Fran^:ois  de  Metel  de, 
154-158,   163 

Bologna,  the  Otiosi  at,  146 

Bostonians,  The,  29 

Botten-Hansen,  Norwegian  bio- 
grapher, 254 

Boulanger,  General,  Clemenceau 
and,  229 

Bourget,  M.  Paul,   38,  43,  215 

Brabazon,  Captain,  execution  of, 
by  a  Chinese  escort,  282 

Brebeuf,  161 

Brisson,  Mathurin,  226 

Brissot,  Pierre,  226 

Broglie,  Due  de,  and  Malherbe's 
visits  to  Hotel  de  Rambouillet, 
109 

Brooke,  Rupert,  Plenry  James's 
friendship  with,  48 

Brother  and  Sister,  a  sonnet  from,  13 
privately  printed  by  George 
Eliot,  12 

Browning,  Robert,  and  George 
Eliot,  3 

Brunetiere,   Ferdinand,  162,  203-4 

Brunot,  M.   Ferdinand,   131 

Bryce,  I,ord,  conveys  insignia  of 
Order  of  Merit  to  bedside  of 
Henry  James,  53 

BufTon,  212 

Burke,  Edmund,    169  et  seq. 

Burlamacchi,   10 

Burne-Jones,  Sir  Edward,  43 

Burnouf,   198 

Burton,  John  Hill,  and  Rousseau, 
188 

Burton,  Sir  Frederick,  his  paintings 
of  George  Eliot,  7 

Butcher,  8.  H.,  145 

Butler,  Canon  Thomas,  63-65 

Butler,  Samuel,  60-73 


Cabinet  Satiriqiie,   165 

Caleb    Williams,    173 

California,  Henry  James  on,  46 

Calvin,  Jean,   124 

Cam6es     Parisiens,     Theodore     de 

Banville's,  201 
Camoens,  263 
Camusat,  Jean,    1O5 
Canterbury  Settlement,  A  First  Year 

in,  Butler's,  66 
Cardwell,     Mr.,     Lord     Wolseley's 

tributes  to,  287 
Carlyle,  Thomas,  and  Rousseau,  184 
Case  Stated,  A,  79 
Cayer's    portrait    of    Catherine    de 

Rambouillet,  104 
Cerisy,   Habert  de,    148 
Chabot,  Catherine,  Racan  and,  109 
Chantefable,   Albert  Mockel's,   269 
Chapelain,  Jean,  100,  105,  118,  119, 

148,  149,  153,  158,  159 
Chastelard,  Swinburne's  original  ilvS. 

of,  89 
Chastelet,  Hay  du,    166 
Chelsea  Old  Church,  funeral  service 

of  Henry  James  at,  53 
Chenier,  Andre,   194 
Children    and    their    love    of   fairy 

tales,  261  et  seq. 
Chinese  Literature,  History  of,  Prof. 

H.  A.  Giles's,  283 
Chinese    War     {i860),     the.     Lord 

Wolseley's     reminiscences     of, 

282 
Chrysaor,   198 
Classical    reaction,    the,    Mallierbe 

and,    123  et  seq. 
CLiudel,  M.  PaiU,  200 
Clemenceau,  Benjamin,  226 
Clemenceau,   Georges,  225-245 
"  Cleomire,"     the     pseudonym     of 

Mine,  de  Ramoouillet  in  Cyrus, 

104 
Clovis,  Desmarets's,   154 
Cobham,  Viscount,  Congreve's  post 

humous  Letter  to,  85 
Coleridge  on  Rousseau,    176 
Collas,  M.,  and  the  memorials  of  the 

Hotel  de  Rambouillet,  100 
College  Breakfast  Party,  A,  13 
Collin,  Sebastian,   226 
Colporteur,  Le,     Guy    de    Slaupas 

saut's,   45 
Comment  aire    du    Discours    sur    le: 

Passions,   Faguet's,   213 
Compton,  Edward,  31 


292 


Inde 


X 


Comte,    Aiiguste,    227 
Couciui,  murder  of,   108 
Confessions,   Rousseau's,    170 
Coiigreve,  William,  77-85 
Conrart,    Valentin,    100,    147,    148, 

165,   166 
Contes  pour  les  Enfanis  d'hicr,  269 

et  seq. 
Contrat  Social,  Rousseau'^,  172,  174, 

176 
Cook,    Sir    Edward,     his    Life     of 

Ruskin,   189 
Coppee,  Francois,  and  Henry  James, 

24 
Corneille,  Pierre,   100,   161 
Cospeau,  at  Hotel  de  Rambouillet, 

100 
Cote  dc  chez  Sivann,  Marcel  Proust's, 

58 
Courtois,  M.   L,ouis  J.,    170  (note), 

190 
Cowley,  Abraham,  139,  263 
Crabbe,  compared  with  Verhaeren, 

194 
Cranford,  2 
Crawford,  Marion,   43 
Cross,  IMrs.   {see  Eliot,  George) 
Culte  de  V Inconipclence,  Le,  214 
Culture  des  I  dies,  La,  218 
Curtis,  Daniel,  31,  48 


D 

Daa,  Pro1'\  Eudwig  Kristensen, 

252,  257 
Daae,  Eudwig,  252-256 
Daisy  Miller,  Henry  James's,  17,  25 
D'Angennes,    Charles,    Marquis    of 

Rambouillet    and    Pisani    [see 

Rambouillet,  Marquis) 
Daniel,  Samuel,  and   the  Coimtess 

of  Bedford's  salon,  100 
Daniel  Deronda,  6,  14 
D'Antilly,  Arnauld   {see  Antilly) 
Darwin,  Charles,  73,  233,  234 
D'Aubigne,  Agrippa   {see  Aubigue) 
Daudet,   Alphonse,    24,    31,   37 
Dawn  in  Britain,  Mr.  Doughty's,  268 
D'Epinay,  Madame  {see  Epinay) 
Diracines,  Les,  38 
Descartes,   117,  161,  210, 
Desert,  Le,  a  poem  by  Eeconte  de 

Lisle,  196 
Desmarets,   Jean,   and  the   French 

Academy,  153,   165 
Desportes,  Philippe,  129-138 
De  Vere,  Aubrey,  23 


De  Vogiie  {see  Vogiie) 

Diary  of  a  Lover  of  Literature,  The, 

173.   174 
Dickens,  Charles,  2,  11 
Diderot,  183 

Discours  sur  I'Amoiir,   120 
Disengaged,    a    comedy    by    Henry 

James,  32 
Disraeli,  Isaac,  and  the  beauty  of 

fairyland,  261 
Dix-huiiieme  Siicie,  Faguet's,  211 
Dobson,    Austin,    79,    146    (note), 

282 
Dolores,   94 
Don  Juan,  182 
Donnay,  Auguste,  illustrates  Contes 

pour  les  Enfants  d'hier,  269 
Donne,  John,  100 
Double  Dealer,   The,  dedication  of, 

80 
Doumic,  M.  Rene,  Faguet  and,  212 
Dowden,  Edward,  145 
Dream  of  Polipliile,   The,   265 
Dreyfus  affair,  the,  239 
Dryden,   80,   81,   199 
Du  Bartas,  Salluste,   126-128 
Du  Bellay,  J.,   125 
Du  Maurier,  George,  27 
Dumur,  M.  Eouis,  218 
Du    Perier,    M.,  Malherbe's  "  Con- 
solation "  to,  139,  140 
Du  Perron,  Cardinal,  Malherbe  and, 

134 
Du  Vair,  M.,  Malherbe  on,  133 


E 

Easter,    and   the    question    of   its 

retardation,  10 
Edinburgh   Review,    174,    175,    176, 

183,   187 
Elgin,    Lord,    and    the    perfidy    of 

Chinese  rulers,  282 
Eliot,  George,   1-16 
Em  He,   173 

En  lisant  Corneille,  Faguet's,  209 
En  lisant  les  Beaux    Vieux  Livres, 

Faguet's,  209,  210 
Endymion,  Gombauld's,   150 
English  Poets,  Historical  Account  of 

the,  Giles  Jacob's,  78,   79 
Epilogues,  Remy    de    Gourmont's, 

221 
Epinay,    Madame   d',    Mimoires   et 

Conversations  of,  183 
Epistle  to  Halifax,  Congreve's,  So 
Erewhon,  Samuel  Butler's,  60 


293 


Ind 


ex 


Erinnyes,    Les,    Lecoiitc   dc   Lisle's 

traj^edy  of,  196 
Esprit  des  Lois,  209 
Eslhitiqiie  de  la  Langue  Eranfaise, 

L',  publication  of,  218 
Etudes  Litt&raires,   I'aguet's,   206 
Europe,    Literature    of,     Hallam's, 

188 
Europeans,  The,  25 
livangelical  movement  in  England, 

the,    185  et  seq. 
livaus,  Isaac,  the  original  of  Tom 

Tulliver,   13 
Evans,  IMarian  [see  Eliot,  George) 
Evans,  IMrs.  Samuel,  the  original  of 

Dinah  Morris,  4 
Evelyn's     Diary,     publication     of, 

115 

Evolution,  Old  and   New,   Butler's, 

73 
Excursion,  The,  Wordsworth's,  176 


Faerie  Queene,   The,  261-266 

Faguet,  Emile,  203-214 

Fair  Haven,  The,  Butler's  attack  on 
Christianity  in,  73 

Fairyland,  the  spell  of,  261  et  seq. 

Faret,  Nicolas,  152-4 

Felix  Holt,  8,   II 

Feuillet,  Octave,  as  rival  to  George 
Eliot,  8 

Ficino,  IMarsiglio,  and  the  Florence 
Academy,  146 

Flaubert,  Gustave,   10,  23,  24 

Fleetwood,  an  English  example  of  a 
Rousseau  novel,   173 

Florence,  foundation  of  an  Aca- 
demy in,   146 

Fontenay-le-Comte,  226 

France,    Anatole,    197,    204 

Francion,  and  its  author,  161 

French  Academj',  foundation  of, 
and  its  founders,   147  et  seq. 

French  Classic  School,  when  and 
how  it  came  into  being,  123  et 
seq. 

French  Revolution,  Reflections  on 
the,  Burke's,   169 

French  Revolution,  the,  Rousseau 
and,   174 

Friend,  The,  Coleridge's  strictures 
on  Rousseau  in,   176 

Friendship  Improv'd,  Charles  Hop- 
kins's last  play,  83 

Furetiere's  Roman  Bourgeois,  117 


Gamle  Krisliania,  Eudwig  Daae's, 
251,  252 

Gaskell,   Mrs.,   2 

Gautier,  Theophile,  Faguet  and,  212 

Gebir,   Eandor's,    195 

Gethin,   Lady,   84 

Giles,  Prof.  H.  A.,  his  History  of 
Chinese  Literature,  283 

Giry,  Louis,  and  the  French 
Academy,  156 

Godeau,  Antoine,   100,    147,  148 

Godwin,  William,   173 

Golden  Bowl,   The,   18,  44,  45 

Gombauld,    148-150 

Gomberville,    1 60 

Gomboust,    107 

Goncourt,  Edniond  de,  23,  31 

Gordon,  General,  his  Nile  expedi- 
tion, and  the  result,  288 

Gourmont,  Gilles  de,  221 

Gourmont,  Remy  de,  214-224 

Gournay,  illle.  de,   150,   164 

Grand  Cyrus,  Le,  a  description  of 
Catherine  de  Rambovullet  in, 
104 

Grand  Pan,  Le,  Clemenceau's,  234 

237 
Green,  John  Richard,   56 
Green,    Thomas,    his    Diary    of   a 

Lover  of  Literature,  ly^,  174 
Green,    T.    H.,    56 
Grieg,  Edvard   Hagerup,  253 
Grimm's   Correspondence,   178 
Guirlande  de  Julie,  118,   151 
Gunlaug,  198 
Guy     Domvile     produced     at     St. 

James's  Theatre,  33,  34 


H 

Habert,  Germain,  and  the  French 

Academy,   151 
Habert;  Philippe,  and  the  inception 

of  the   French   Academy,    149 

151 

Hald,  Dr.  Neils  Christian,  254 

Halifax,  Charles  Eord,  rewards 
Congreve  for  dedication  of 
The  Double  Dealer,  So 

Hall,  Bishop  Joseph,  on  Du  Bartas, 
127 

Hallam,  on  Rousseau,  1S8 

Hamadryad,  The,  195 

Handel,  Samuel  Butler's  infatua- 
tion for  music  of,  70 


294 


Index 


Hardy,     Thomas,     compared    with 

Alfred  de  Vigny,  194 
Hawthorne,    publication    of    Henry 

James's,  17,  27 
Hazlitt,     William,     12,     179,     180, 

265 
Helps     to     Composition,     Simeon's, 

186 
Henri  IV,  98,  99.   134-   I35 
Herbert,  George,   116 
Hermsprong,   Cage's,   173 
Higginsun,  Colonel,  his  definition  of 

a  cosmopolitan,  28 
History  of  Chinese  Literature,  Lord 

Wolseley  and,  2S3 
Holcroft,  Thomas,  Hugh  Trevor  of, 

173 
Homer,  Samuel  Butler's  enthusiasm 

for,  69 
Hormetc  Homme,  L',  Faret's,   153 
Hopkins,   Charles,   82,  83 
Hopkins,  Ezekiel,  Bishop  of  Derry, 

82 
Hotel  de  Chevreuse,  Paris,  107 
Hotel  de  Rambouillet,  the,  97  et  seq. 
Howells,  Willianr  Dean,  his  friend- 
ship with  Henry  James,  21 
Hugh  Trevor,  Holcroft's,  173 
Hugo,  Victor,  193,   199,  210,  243 
Hume,  Burton's  Life  of,  188 
Hunt,  Mrs.  Arabella,  Congreve'sOrfe 

on,  81 
Hutton,  Richard  Holt,  editor  of  the 

Spectator,  252 
Hyeres,   Henry   James   visits   Paul 

Bourget  at,  43 
Hyndman,    Mr.,    and    Clemenceau, 

230  (note) 


Ibsen,  Henrik,     a     visit    to     the 

friends  of,  247  et  seq. 
Imaginary     Conversations,     W.     S. 

Landor's,   184 
Impossible   Thing,   An,  Mr.   Wise's 

copy  of,  78,  79 
Inchbold,    Mrs.,    Rousseau's    influ- 
ence on,   173 
Incognita,  Congreve's,  240 
International  Episode,  An,   17,  25 
Island  of  Rest,   The,  an  outline  of, 

270 
It  is  Never  Too  Late  to  Mend,  2 
Ivory    Toiver,    The,    an    unfinished 

novel    by    Henry    James,    48, 

52 


Jaab.^k,  SOren,  Norwegian  poli- 
tician, 252,  256 

Jack,  Alphouse  Daudet's  success 
A\itli,  24 

Jacob,  GUes,  Historical  Account,  79, 
80,  83 

Jacobi,  Professor,  his  researches  in 
Sanscrit  literature,   198 

Jameison,  INIrs.,  comments  on  Rous- 
seau's Confessions,  188 

James,   Henry,   17-53 

James,  Henry,  the  elder,  20 

James,  William,  19,  20,  48,  49 

Jammes,  M.  Francis,  200 

Jane  Eyre,  2 

Janet's  Repentance,  4 

Jansen,  Kristoffer,  Norwegian  poet, 

255 

Jansenists,  the,  219,  220 

Jeffrey,  Francis,  174,  176,  183,  1S4 

Jesuits,  the,  Gourniont  and,  219, 
220 

Jesus,  Strauss's  Life  of,  6 

John  Inglesant,  Shorthouse's,   5G 

Johnson,   Dr.,  85,  240 

Jones,  Mr.  Henry  Festing,  77 
et  seq. 

Jonson.  Ben,   100 

Joujou  Patriotisnie,  Le,  Goiinnont's 
article,   and  its  results,   216 

Joyeuse  Jeunesse  de  Tallemant,  114 
(note) 

Judgment  of  Paris,  The,  86 

Jugement  de  Konor,  Le,  199 

Juvenal,  Dryden's  composite  trans- 
lation of,  81 


K 

Kain,  Leconte  de  Lisle's,  195 

Keats,   194,   199 

Keyser,  J.  R.,  death  of,  258 

Kliiron,   195 

Kingsley,   Charles,   2 

Kipling,      Mr.      Rudyard,      Henry 

James  and,  44 
Kitchener,  Lord,  and  the  Boer  War, 

283 
Kongsemnerne,  Ibsen's,  259 


I,ACTANTius,  236 

Lagrime    di    San    Pietro,    author's 
paraphrase  of,   132 


295 


Ind 


ex 


Lake  Poets,  the,  and  Rousseau,  176 
Ivandor,  Walter  vSava^e,   184,   195 
Lang,  Andrew,   145,  274,  2H4 
Lanson,  M.,  on  Chapelain,  14Q 
La  Rochefoucauld,  Maxims  of,  117 
Lassen,  Pastor,  and  Soren  Jaaba'k, 

256 
Laus   Veneris,  first  draft   of  Swin- 
burne's,  i-'g 
Lavisse,  M.,  gg 
"  Lawrenny,  H."  {see  Simcox) 
Lecky,  W.  E.   PL,   56 
Lee,    Robert  Edward,   Confederate 
general,        Lord        Wolseley's 
opinion  of,  278 
Lee,  Sir  Sidney,  and  Desportes,  128 
Lemaitre,  Jules,  204 
Leonardo,  Samuel  Butler  on,  70 
Les  Reaux  (see  Tallemant) 
Lessing,  George  Eliot  and,  6 
Lesson  of  the  Master,  The,  1 8 
Letter    to    Viscount    Cobhani,    Con- 

greve's,  85 
Letires,   Balzac's,   162 
Lewes,  George  Henry,   i,  6 
Liber  Am  oris,  Hazlitt's,  179 
Life  of  Congreve,  Gosse's,  77 
Life  of  Marlborough,  Wolseley's,  279 
Lisle,  Leconte  de,   193-202 
Literature  of  Europe,  Hallam's,  1S8 
Livet,  Ills  history  of  Hotel  de  Ram- 

bouillet,   loi 
Livres  des  Masques,  Gourmont's,  217 
Lodge,  Thomas,  on  Desportes,   129 
Lofft,  Capel,   176 
Loges,  Madame  de,   no 
Lokke,  Jakob,   249-259 
Love   Triumphant,   Congreve's  con- 
tribution to,   81 
Lubbock,  Mr.  Percy,  19,  28,  39,  50 
Luthier  de  Cr6morne,  Coppee's,  24 
Luxembourg,  the,  modelled  on  the 

Hotel  de  Rambouillet,   107 
Lyell,  Sir  Charles,  232 
Lyng,    G.    v.,    Norwegian   philoso- 
pher,  252 


M 

Mackintosh,  Sir  James,  172 
Madam     Inger     at     Osterraad,      a 

threatened  pirated  edition  of, 

250 
Madame  Bovary,   24 
Maeterlinck,  M.,  Gourmont  and,  216 
Octave  ilirbeau's  description  of, 

269 


Magne,  M.    Emile,    loi,    104,    107, 

184,   151,   154,   155 
Maison   du   Berger,    La,    Alfred    de 

Vigny's,  210 
Malherbe,   Prau9ois,   108-110,  132- 

143 
Mallarme,  S.,  216 
Malleville,  Claude  de,  148,  151,  159 
Man  That  lost  his  Heifer,  The,  79 
Mangeront-ils,    tragedy,    by    Victor 

Hugo,   243 
Marie   de  Medicis,   108,   150 
Marivaux,  21,  211 
Marlborough,  Duke  of.  Lord  Wolse- 
ley's Life  of,  279 
Marmontel,  memoirs  of,   175 
Mary  H,  Queen,  Congreve's  ode  on 

death  of,  85 
Maucroix  on  Tallemant,  114 
Maupassant,  Guy  de,  24,  45 
Maurice,  Sir  P'rederick,  273 
Maiurier,   George  du   [see  Du  Mau- 

rier) 
IMaxse,  Admiral,  227 
Maynard,   160,  163 
Melie  Sociale,  La,  231,  233 
Menage,  M.,  151,   162 
]\Ieredith,  George,  8g 
ilerivale,  Herman,  ifclS 
Merivale,  John  Herman,  177 
Michel  Angelo,  Samuel  Butler  on,  70 
Middle  Years,  The,   19,  21,  52 
Middlemarch,  9,   14 
Mill,  John  Stuart,  7,   231,  243 
Mill  on  the  Floss,  The,  4,  8,  13 
Mirbeau,  Octave,  233,  269 
Mockel,  Albert,  269  et  seq. 
Moe,   Jorgen,    appointed   Bishop  of 

Christianssand,  253,  254 
Moliere,   161 
ilolza,    Francesco,   and  the  heresy 

of  Petrarchism,   129 
Monnier's    Influence    attribute    aux 

philosophes,  174 
Monsieur  de  Cantors,  8 
Montagne,  Lettres  de  la,  Rousseau's, 

170 
Montague,  Charles,  80 
Montaigne,  124,  150 
Moutausier,  Due  de,  103,  118 
Montesquieu,  Faguet's  estimate  of, 

212 
Morgante   Maggiore,    burlesque    of, 

266,  267 
Morillot,  Professor  Paul,  on  French 

poetry,   130 
Morley,    John  (Viscoimt),    27,   145, 

179 


296 


Ind 


ex 


Morris,  William,  23,  56 
Morte  d' Arthur,   Beardsley's,  269 
Mourning  Muse  of  Alexis,  The,  Dr. 
Johnson  on,  85 


N 

Namur,     Congreve's    ode    on    the 

taking  of,  84-5 
Narrative  of  the    War  with   China, 

Lord  Wolseley's,  282 
Nature  and  Art,  Mrs.  Inchbold's,  173 
Nerval,  Gerard  de,  221 
New  Criticism  of  J.  J.    Rousseau, 

191 
Newdigate,  Sir  Roger,  the  original 

of  Christopher  Cheverel,   4 
Nicholas  de  Verdun,  141 
Nietzsche,  221 

Norges  Doemring,  Welhaven's,  254 
Norse  legends,  celebrated  collectors 

of,   253 
Northbrook,    Lord,    Wolseley    and, 

287,  2S8 
Norwegian  Historical  Society,  the, 

255 
Notes  of  a  Son  and  Brother,  19 
Nourmahal,  Leconte  de  Lisle's,  199 
NouveUe  Helolse,   173,   182 


O 

Ode  ci  Richelieu,  149 

Gidipe,  Tallemant's,  114 

Ogier,    Jean,    Sieur    de    Gombauld 

[see  Gombauld) 
Old  Bachelor,  The,  81 
Oldmixon,   John,   his  Life  of  Con- 

greve,   77 
Olivet,  Abbe  d',  on  Balzac's  Lettres, 

162 
Ordiug,  Rektor  Frederik,  247 
Origin  of  Inequality,  Discourse  on, 

185 
Oskar,   Prince,  unveils  a  statue  of 
Harald  Fairhair,  249 


Parkes,  Sir  Harry,  283 
Pascal,   115,  161,  220 
Passionate  Pilgrim,  A,  21,  23 
Pasteur,  Clemenceau  influenced  by, 

243 
Pater,  Walter,  222 


Patmore,  Coventry,  3 

Patru    114 

Pauli,  Charles,  67,  68 

Peiresc,  Malherbe's  correspondence 

with,    135 
Pelisson,  100,   143,  152 
Peiidant    I'Orage,    de    Gourmont's, 

222 
Pepys's  Diary,   115 
Pericles  and  Aspasia,  195 
Petrarch  and  his  imitators,  128 
Pillans,  James,   177  (note) 
Pinchesne,   115 

Pindare-Le  Brun,  Faguet  on,  211 
Pindariquc  Ode,  Congreve's,  84 
Pisani,  Marquis  de,  103 
Plaisant    Abbi    de    Boisrobert,    Le, 

154 
Plato,  "  one  of  the  seven  humbugs 

of  Christendom,"  70 
Plummer,   iliss  INIary,   marries  M. 

Clemenceau,  228 
Plus  Belles  Pages,  Les,  221 
Plus   Forts,  Les,  226,  239,  240 
Pocket-Book  for  Field  Service,  Lord 

Wolseley's,  277 
Poetnes  Antiques,  193,  198,  199 
Poemes    Barbares,    193,    197,    198, 

200 
Poems    and    Ballads,    Swinburne's, 

first  drafts  of,  88 
Polexandre,  163 
Polyeucte,  210 
Preface     de    I'Adone,     Chapelain's, 

118,   149 
Preterita,  Ruskin's  acknowledgment 

to  Rousseau  in,  189 
Princess  Casamassima,  The,  29 
Prior,  IMatthew,   79 
Prisoner  of  Chillon,  The,  182 
Probleme  du  Style,  Le,   publication 

of,  218,  222 
Piomenades  Litteiaiyes,  221 
P,omei:ades  Philosophiques,  221 
Pi  oposals  for  an  A  ssocialion,  Shel- 
ley's,  177 
Prose  pour  des  Esseintes,  202 
Prothero,    ^  ir    George,    as    sponsor 

for  Henry  James,  53 
Proust,  M.  Marcel,  his  C6t&  de  chez 

Swann,   58 
Provincial  Letters,  219 
Provinciates,  Les,  220 
Pucelle,   149 
Pulci,  as  inventor  of  the  genre,  2C6, 

267 
Py  rand  re,   155 
Pyrrhus,  King  of  Epirus,  83 


'■97 


Inde3 


Q 

Quarterly  Review,  the,  and  Rousseau, 

177,   178,   182 
Quillard,  M.  rierre,  227 


R 


120,     132,    133,    144, 


RARKr.Ais,  13; 
Racan,     log, 

160,   164 
Racine,    igy 
Raleigh,      vSir     Walter,      .S^jenser's 

analysis  of   The  Faerie   Queetie 

and,  264 
Ramayann,    198 

Rarabouiliet,  Elizabeth  de,   114 
Rambouillct,    Hotel   de    {see    Hotel 

de  Ramboiiillet) 
Raiubouillet,  JVIarquis  de,    102 
Rambouillet,  Marquise  de,  and  her 

salon,  100  et  seq. 
Rapin,    Pere,    and    Tallemant    des 

Reaux,   114,   115 
Reade,  Charles,  as  rival  of  George 

Eliot,  2 
Real  Right    Thing,    The,    45 
Recueil  de  Lettres  Noiivclles,  155 
Reflections    on    the    Revolution    in 

France,   169 
Reguier,  Matliurin,   136 
Reliquics  Gethitiiance,   84 
Renan,   237,   243 
Reprobate,    The,    refused 

managers,  33 
Richelieu,    100,    120,    143, 
Richelieu,  Ode  d,   149 
Roberts,  Earl,   2 84 
Robinet,  121 
Robinson,  Crabb,  26 
Roderick    Hudson,    Henry  James's, 

25.  47 

Roman  Bourgeois,  Furetiere's,  117 
Roman  d'un  Jeune  Homme  Pauvre, 

Le,  8 
Romaunt  of  the  Rose,  The,  265 
Romola,  10 

Ronsard,   124,  137,   138 
Rosamond,  Swinburne's,  89 
Rosebery,  Earl  of,  279 
Rossetti,  D.  G.,  3 
Rotrou,   161 

Round  Table,  Hazlitt's,  179 
Rousseau,   1 69-1 91 
Royal   Society   of   Literature,    the, 

145 
Ruskin,  John,  11,  23,   189 


by    stage 
146-164 


Rye,  Henry  James  at,  35  et  seq. 
Rygh,   Dr.   Oluf,   255,  256 


Sacriflce  des  Muses,  Le,   155 

Saint-Amant,   153,   160,   163 

vSaint-Simon,  113 

Saint-Sorliu,  Desmarets  de  {see 
Desmarets) 

Saint  Victor,  Paiil  de,  203 

Sales,  Francois  de,  Saint,   146 

Sand,  George,  5 

Sarcey,    Francisque,   196,  244 

vSargeut,  :Mr.  J.  S.,  49 

Sarrasa,  Father,  219 

Sars,    J.   E.   W.,   251 

Saussure,  Madame  Necker,  pub- 
lishes INIadame  de  Stael's 
Q^uvres  Inedites,   183 

Sauze,  M.  Charles,  and  the  founda- 
tion of  the  Hotel  de  Ram- 
bouillet,  107 

Savage,  Miss  Eliza  Mary  Ann,  60 
et  seq. 

Savella,  Julia,  mother  of  Catherine 
de  Vivonne,  102 

Savoy,  the  Academic  Florimontane 
in,   146 

Scarron,    164 

Scenes  of  Clerical  Life,  8 

Schmid,   Dr.   D.,   77 

Scott,  Sir  Walter,  5,   173,   182,   183 

Scudery,  104 

Scudery,  Madeleine  de,  her  pen- 
"  portrait  "  of  Catherine  de 
Rambouillet,   105 

Sedgemoor,  Battle  of.  Lord  Wolse- 
ley's  account  of,  279 

Segrais,  memoirs  of,  100 

Self  and  Life,  poem  by  George 
Eliot,   13 

Semaines,  Les,  of  Du  Bartas,  126 

Semeur,  Le,  Victor  Hugo's,  210 

Sense  of  the  Past,  The,  an  unfinished 
novel  by  Henry  James,  52 

Serisay,  Jacques  de,   14S,   150,   165 

vSe-\agne,  Madame  de,  117 

Shelley,  177,  180 

Sheltou,  Richard,   79 

Sheridan,  General  Philip  Henry, 
277,  278 

Sherman,  General  William 

Tecumseh,   277 

Siena,  the  lutronati  at,  146 

Sigurd  Jorsalfar,  253 

Silas  Marner,  4 


298 


Inde 


X 


Simcox,  Edith  ("  H.  La^vrenny  "),  i 
Simeon,     Charles,     leader     of    the 

Evangelical  movement,   i86 
Simondi,  on  the  character  of  Rous- 
seau,  184 
Six  line,  215 

Small  Boy  and  Others,  A,  19 
Smith,   Charlotte,   173 
Smith,  Sir  James  Edward,  187 
Song  of  Italy,  A,  first  draft  of,  91 
Songs  before  Sunrise,  95 
Sonnet    to    Lake    Leman,    Byron's, 

182 
Sorel,  Charles,  author  of  Francion, 

161 
Southerne,  81 

Southey,  and  Rousseau,   176 
Spanish  Gypsy,   The,   12 
Spencer,  Herbert,   2,  232,   243 

objects  to  purchase  of  fiction,  2 
Spenser,  Edmiiud,  262,  263,  267 
Spinoza's       Tractatus      Theologica- 

Politicus,  6 
Spoils  of  Poynton,  The,  37 
Squire  Trelooby,   86 
Stael,     Madame    de,     her    (Euvres 

Inedites,  1S3 
Stang,  Emil,  250 
Stang,  Frederik,  250 
Stendhal,   Byron  and,   1S2 
Stephen,  Sir  Leslie,  10,  84 
Stevenson,  Robert  Louis,  29 
Story  of  a  Soldier's  Life,  The,  274, 

288 
Story,  W.  W.,  Life  of,  17 
Straus's     Life     of    Jesus,     George 

EHot's  translation  of,  6 
Streatfeild,  R.  A.,  62 
Studies  in  the  France  of  Voltaire  and 

Rousseau,   190 
Summers,  Mr.  Montague,   78 
Sverdrup,  Norwegian  politician,  252 
Swift,  Jonathan,   15 
Swinburne,   Algernon    Charles,    88 

et  seq. 
Sylvester,  Joshua,  translates  poems 

of  Du  Bartas,  126,  127 
Sylvester,    Professor,    his  laws  for 

verse-making,   12 


Taixe,   H.,  243 

Tallemant,    Gedeon    (des    Reaux), 

103,   108-115,   137,   148,   163 
Tansillo's   Lagrime   di    San   Pietro, 

Malherbe's  paraphrase  of,  132 


Taylorian   Lecture    (1920),   the,    at 

Oxford,   123 
Temple  de  la  Mort,  Le,  by  Philippe 

Habert,  151 
Temple,    Sir    William,    Essays    of, 

162 
Tenants,  a  comedy  by  Henry  James, 

32 
Tennyson,  Lord,   12,   15,  69,  2^9 
Tentation  de  St.  Antoine,  Flaubert's, 

24 
Thackeray,  W.  M.,  2,  80 
Theophrastus  Such,   15 
Thrasymedes  and  Etinoe,  195 
Titian,  Samuel  Butler  on,  70 
Tragic  Muse,  The,  Henry  James's, 

30 
Trollope,  Anthony,  2 
Turgenev  introduces  Henry  James 

to  Flaubert,  24 
Turn    of    the    Screw,    The,    Henry 

James's  ghost  story,  38 
Two  Foscari,  The,  182 
Two    Visits   to  Denmark,    author's, 

247 


U 

Ubicixi's  edition  of  Voiture's  works, 

100 
Ursins,   Charlotte   des   {see  Auchy, 

Vicomtesse  d') 


V 

Vai,lette,  M.,  director  of  the 
Mercure  de  France,  216 

Vahniki,  La  Mort  de,  196 

\'anbrugh.  Sir  John,   15 

\'an  Mol,  paints  portrait  of  Cather- 
ine de  Rambouillet,  104 

Vaugelas,   143,   160,   166 

Vauquelin  de  la  Fresnaye,  Llal- 
herbe  and,  134 

Vauvenargues,  212 

Vayer,    Lamothe    de,   161 

Vega,  Lope  de,  132 

Vere,  Aubrey  de  {see  Dc  Vcre) 

Verhaereu,  Emile,   194 

Verlaine,  216,  227 

Vibe,  Frederik  Ludwig,  255 

Vigny,  Alfred  de,   194 

VindicicB  Gallicce,  Sir  James  Mac- 
kintosh's,  172 

Visionnaires,  Lcs,  Desmarets's 
comedy  of,  154 


299 


Ind 


ex 


Vivonne,  Catherine  de  {see  Ram- 
bouillct,  Marquise  de) 

Vogiie,   Vicomte  Melchior  de,  43 

Voiture,  Vincent,  100,  113,  116- 
119,   161,   163 

Voltaire,   212 

Voyage  en  Suisse,  criticism  of  Rous- 
seau in,   184 


W 

Wade,  Sir  T.,  Lord  Wolseley  on, 

283 
Warner,  Samuel  Butler  on,  70 
Waipole,  Mr.  Hugh,  48 
Waryiors    of  Helgeland,    a    pirated 

edition  of,  250 
Way  of  All  Flesh,  The,  60,  62,  63 
Way  of  the  World,  The,  Congreve's, 

83 
Welhaven,  Johau    Sebastian,    254, 

257 
Wells,  Mr.  H.  G.,  44 
Wergelaud,  grotto  of,  254 


Westminster    Revieu),    the,    George 

Ivliot  as  sub-editor  of,  6 
Westward  I  Jo  !,    2 
Wharton,  I\Irs.,  44 
What  Maisie  Knew,  37 
Whewell's  Moral  Philosophy,  J.  S. 

Mill's   treatment   of,    censured 

by  George  Kliot,  7 
"  Wilson,  Charles  "  (see  Oldmixou, 

John) 
Wings  of  a  Dove,  The,  44 
Winton,  Sir  P'rancis  de,   282-3 
Wise,  Mr.  Tho.s.  J.,  78,  91 
Within  the  Riyn,  52 
Wolseley,  Lady,  275,  278 
Wolseley,  Viscount,  273-290 
Wordsworth,  13,   176 


Yeats,  Mr.  w.  B.,  266 


Zoi^A,  j3mii,e,  24,  215,  239 


Printed  in   England  by  Cassell  &  Company,  Limited,  London,  E.G. 4. 

F25.222 


THE  LIBRARY 
UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 

Santa  Barbara 
Golcta,  California 


THIS  BOOK  IS  DUE  ON  THE  LAST  DATE 
STAMPED  BELOW. 


3,'59(A552s4)476 


3  1205  02336  3441 


UC  SOUTHERN  REGIONAL  LIBRARY  FACILITY 


AA    001  062  741    2 


